Our Friend Logan

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Our Friend Logan

music & nightlife |

Photographs by Sara Sanger
Real: ‘Logan was one of the only performers I know who was exactly the same onstage as off,’ says Michael Houghton.

By Sara Bir

The album of 2007 was released the day after Christmas 2006. We were shepherds watching our flocks of plastic snowmen lawn ornaments, and Logan Whitehurst’s Very Tiny Songs came upon us, glowing with goodness and light.

Logan Whitehurst, founding drummer of the Velvet Teen and the tireless creative engine behind his solo project, Logan Whitehurst and the Junior Science Club, passed away on Dec. 3, 2006, after fighting brain cancer for several years. He was 29. A tribute to his life and art is slated for Feb. 10.

If this is a story of loss, it is also one of legacy, one in which Logan’s swan song, the joyful, 76-minute micro-opus Very Tiny Songs, offers a bittersweet tonic of comfort. Listening to Very Tiny Songs is the audio equivalent of eating an entire bag of M&Ms and savoring every bite.

Logan grew up in the Central Valley, kidding around with his cousins and siblings, winning spelling bees and recording goofy skits. He got into music when his stepbrother started a band. “I went out in the garage, and I’d kind of bang on stuff to keep time for them,” Logan said in a 2003 interview with the Bohemian. “My stepmother heard this and went and paid $75 and bought a drum kit.” Logan would use that same sparkly red drum kit throughout his entire drumming career.

While pursuing a printmaking degree at Sonoma State University, Logan became an integral figure in the Sonoma County music scene. He met Owen Otto in 1995, when Otto’s geek-rock band Little Tin Frog put up flyers looking for a drummer. “It had a They Might Be Giants reference, ‘Rhythm Section Want Ad,'” Otto recalls. “We put Logan in, and instantly it just worked.”

During that time in Little Tin Frog, Logan began recording songs on his own. “I didn’t know how to use a four-track, and I didn’t know how to play any instruments,” Logan said of his early experiments with songwriting. “I couldn’t work out my ideas very well, and I just wanted to play with sounds. I’d sit down and try to harmonize with myself or start a drum machine . . . and that lack of skill translated to great appeal. It sounded like I was either trying really hard to make it bad, or I was just having fun.”

Thus, Logan Whitehurst and the Junior Science Club was born. With a vacant, smiling plastic snowman named Vanilla as his sidekick, Logan charmed audiences with his complete disregard for image and coolness–which, of course, only made him that much cooler. “Logan was one of the only performers I know who was exactly the same onstage as off,” says Michael Houghton, who published the underground music magazine Section M, to which Logan contributed a darkly funny comic strip, “Jonathan Quimby.”

“But I think that ease and earnestness is so rare that it was completely riveting,” Houghton continues. “I’ve talked to the hardest of little street punks who pretty much hate everything, who would gather around and sit in a semicircle when Logan played, giggling and cheering for more.”

Through websites like MP3.com, where his songs had over 100,000 downloads, Logan Whitehurst and the Junior Science Club built a dedicated online following. “It wasn’t just for distributing his music,” says Otto. “He would get in conversation with fans.”

“I think as his music got more of a cult following, he was getting that sort of instant gratification from more and more fans,” Houghton says. “Which is a big part of why he was always so gracious and personable to everyone he met, because they were a big part of his enjoyment of making art.”

Barry Hansen–better known as Dr. Demento, host of an eponymous long-standing weekly radio program showcasing “mad music and crazy comedy”–has championed Logan’s music since 2000, but it wasn’t until he came across Goodbye, My 4-Track in 2003 that something clicked. “Goodbye, My 4-Track just knocked me out from beginning to end,” he says. “It was a bit like hearing Sgt. Pepper for the first time.”

Logan’s solo work–and there are piles of it, a total of seven releases as the Junior Science Club and dozens of unreleased songs–combines a keen sense of wit with offbeat references both highbrow (plate tectonics) and lowbrow (the Spice Girls), all with a vaudevillian knack for showmanship.

“I’ve met a lot of talented people in my 36 years in radio, but Logan is extra special,” says Dr. Demento. “He creates a world that is a lot of fun to be in, even when darker things happen. His music is uncommonly melodic and absolutely loaded with hooks. And when I eventually got to know him a little, he turned out to be so gracious and witty, articulate and confident yet modest.”

Your friend, Logan: A celebration of Logan Whitehurst’s life is planned for Feb. 10 at the Phoenix Theater.

In 2000, Logan joined his former Little Tin Frog bandmate Judah Nagler in the art-pop band the Velvet Teen. Along with bassist Josh Staples, the trio maintained an ambitious touring schedule. It was shortly before leaving to tour Japan with the Velvet Teen that Logan began to suffer from headaches, nausea and dizziness. After many visits to many doctors, Logan was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2004. He moved in with his parents in Los Banos, where ridding his body of cancer though a demanding series of treatments became the singular focus in his life.

“What he went through being sick would have crushed a lot of people a lot earlier,” says Otto. “He had a philosophy of ‘this is my life and this is who I am, and I can’t control everything, so I have to go with the flow of what’s happening.’ He was an enormously optimistic and positive person in general. I could tell you dozens of stories of times where as a band we’d be driving around in the van all miserable, and he’d be upbeat, making jokes and trying to turn the situation around.”

Very Tiny Songs was Logan’s return to making music. This past summer, his doctors were optimistic; his cancer treatment came to a close, and he moved into what all hoped would be an extended period of remission. After being physically unable to make music for several years, Logan was motivated and eager to prove himself. With a future so open it was equally thrilling and terrifying, he looked to his online friends for inspiration and began writing and recording songs on the fly as mechanism to get back into the swing of things.

“I thought, ‘I’d better get ready, because I’m going to start doing stuff again,'” he said when he spoke to me on the phone from Los Banos last July. “I hit on this idea that I could get some sort of communication going with people again if I put it out there that I want suggestions for songs. I’ll make a bunch of songs to put on my website and you guys’ll download them and see that I’m still out there and still wanna do music.”

Fans, many of whom Logan had never met in person, inundated him with song suggestions, and he threw himself into the project, writing one to six songs a day for a month. By the time he was done, he’d recorded 81 songs. Most run only about a minute long, but each one is its own distinct entity–very short stories, or very concise jingles. More properly, they are very tiny songs, and they are hugely entertaining.

Very Tiny Songs is a privileged look into Logan’s creative process, and it conjures up all kinds of fascinating ideas about opening up the mind, dumping it out and seeing the surprising order in what’s there. “I was very much in the moment; there are some songs on there that I’m kind of surprised I actually wrote,” Logan said. “When I would sit down and think, ‘This isn’t good enough,’ the songs would slow down, and it kind of spiraled. So most of the time, if I found I was thinking too much, I would do the first thing that came to mind, the first thing that rhymed.”

Having been recorded in such a freewheeling manner, Very Tiny Songs betrays nary a whiff of sloppy impressionism; the song’s musical concepts are compressed, yes, but undeniably fully formed. “Unicorns” opens with a dewy, soft-focus harp that’s pure fantasy clichÈ, but suddenly veers into ’80s dance-hall synth with a rap interlude worthy of Eric B. & Rakim: “Gonna bust a move with a unicorn / Gonna get on down with the one big horn.” In “Michael Is the President of the English Club,” Logan’s mock-stuffy riff on Anglophilia could easily stand toe-to-toe with an installment of Masterpiece Theatre.

“Pop songs usually have two or three parts: verse, chorus or maybe a bridge,” Otto says. “In most of those songs on Very Tiny Songs, he has the parts. To make it a longer song is the easy part. It would take most people a lot longer to write 81 songs.”

Very Tiny Songs‘ relentless sense of melody and ambitious scope can overwhelm the listener on the first three or even 12 plays, with surprising benefits. “It is such a long album, invariably you’re going to need a snack or someone’s going to call your cell phone,” says Josh Drake of Pandacide Records, the label that released Very Tiny Songs. “In that 70-plus minutes of music, you’ll miss a song, so you’re always finding new ones. He didn’t write a bad song on the whole thing.”

Weeks after he completed the songs and artwork for Very Tiny Songs, Logan was plagued with headaches and dizzy spells. A visit to the doctor revealed that his cancer had returned with a vengeance, and he was told he’d likely have less than a year to live.

After Logan’s death, response from fans and online friends was enormous.

Dr. Demento featured Logan’s music on his first program of the year; tribute videos cropped up on YouTube; people posted consoling thoughts on the Junior Science Club’s MySpace page. On far-flung message boards and obscure podcasts, people came forward to remember Logan.

When writing e-mails to fans, Logan always closed with “Your Friend, Logan.” Reading that always made me feel warm, excited–Logan is my friend!–because, even in the inexpressive confines of text on a computer screen, you could tell he truly meant it. Anyone would be fortunate to have a friend like Logan, and he was a friend to many.

There will be a memorial celebrating the life, art and music of Logan Whitehurst on Saturday, Feb. 10, at the Phoenix Theater. The public is welcome to attend. 201 Washington St., Petaluma. 8pm. 707.762.3565. Those wanting to learn more about Logan and his music can visit www.loganwhitehurst.com and www.juniorscienceclub.com.




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Art Imitates Design

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Art Imitates Design

the arts | visual arts |

Design 2007:
Hello Creative | Russian Orthodox Frescoes | Drawing as the New Design

‘Basketball Pyramid’: David Huffman’s mixed-media piece is among the drawings on exhibit at the di Rosa.

By Brett Ascarelli

‘There’s a lot of young blood tonight!” gushes a staff member at the di Rosa Preserve’s opening of “Graphic: New Bay Area Drawing.” Later, I ask another staff member about the evening’s hipster quotient.

“Well, with this kind of show . . .”

“Drawing?”

“Yeah,” she answers.

Enough said. Indeed, drawing is the hip, young thing of the art world, forging its own trail in the last decade among its more august cousins, painting and sculpture. Last year, Art News devoted its entire January issue to drawing, and even the most important international art fairs have been crammed with simple media like pencil and pen.

Bay Area artists have turned out a variety of drawings for the di Rosa exhibit. One pen, gouache and watercolor repeats tiny patterns that resemble rice grains falling from one Smurf’s hat into another. Further on, a dark landscape of ink splatters, skeletal trees and orange basketballs references the modern baroque style of a recent Urban Outfitters ad campaign.

Looking at the iconic, flat and insanely precise works, one is reminded of modern Japanese, American and Swedish commercial aesthetic sensibilities. But this is art, not design. Or is it?

Michael Schwager, di Rosa curator and progenitor of this newest exhibit, stands apart from the food table. This is the second drawing exhibit he’s curated since works in this medium wowed him at the Art Basel: Miami Beach art fair in November 2005. What’s driving the aesthetic?

“Cartooning and graphic novels are a huge influence, I think, on a generation of twenty- to forty-somethings,” says Schwager. “A more informal way of making an image, like cartoons, is becoming more accepted, whereas in the ’50s, most artists worked towards making huge, abstract expressionist paintings.

“It’s very different today. There’s a different aesthetic goal in mind; every generation is different. Pop art commented on consumer society; the ’80s drew on art history. The influences of today are often in popular culture,” says Schwager.

Nevertheless, he cautions, “these artists have much more aesthetic concerns than graphic design. The work comes from a more personal place or from popular culture.”

In fact, Schwager clarifies that the word “graphic” in the show’s title has “no relation to graphic design, whatsoever–I was just thinking graphic in terms of images on paper.”

Dean Smith, 45, has two large-scale drawings in the show. The drawings look like staggered starbursts filled in with thousands of teensy strokes. The pattern they make is not dissimilar to the hairs of his salt-and-pepper beard, only more numerous. Like his drawings, Smith’s personal aesthetic tonight is monochromatic.

“The works are centering devices: centering one’s attention, consciousness and perception,” says Smith, who stopped painting about 12 years ago to focus on drawing.

Are there any pop cultural influences on his work?

“Absolutely zero!” he responds hotly.

But pop culture seeps into our psyches, and it reaches us through the catchy branding of design. Today’s ubiquitous icons can’t help but rub off onto artist’s pads, even if the artists don’t admit it.

Artist Ala Ebtekar does admit it–and happily. His digital prints of cartoony warriors are a highlight of the show. To make them, he scans his original drawings, then works on them with Flash and Adobe Illustrator. The resulting images are Transformer-like men carrying traditional heroic attributes–and hip-hop gear.

In an e-mail from Paris, where Ebtekar is currently staying, he describes why he chose his computer aesthetic. “Most importantly, [these pieces are] really a reflection of NOW,” he writes. “I could have used the medium I am more familiar with–in my case, drawing or painting–but after coming up with the idea of what I wanted these characters to be, and how I wanted them to be read, using the computer as a tool to convey that seemed only obvious. I think that sleekness, and the idea that they could be mass-made (and not a one-of-a-kind art object), is something that appealed to me.”

As current trends in graphic design incorporate handmade typefaces, scribbles and crafts, art itself is doing the reverse. Graphic design is finally coming home to roost–boosting the art form that created them.

‘Graphic: New Bay Area Drawing’ is on view through Wednesday, March 10, at the Gatehouse Gallery in the di Rosa Preserve, 5200 Carneros Hwy., Napa. 707.226.5991. For complete details on the Preserve, go to www.dirosapreserve.org.



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Letters to the Editor

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January 31-February 6, 2007

milking the public purse?

As Pogo so aptly observed, “We have met the enemy–and it is us!” That is, for voting into office, election after election. Some people in California worry about illegal aliens pouring across the border from Mexico. I worry far more about insidious parasites like Feinstein who milk the public purse for all its worth while proclaiming loudly about how she’s looking out for us. Yikes!

Michael Stubblefield, Oxnard

illuminati

Congratulations to the Bohemian and Peter Byrne on the interesting and comprehensive article about Sen. Feinstein. This most illuminating story regarding “a public servant” deserves recognition and further publication!

Bill Yoes, Abilene, Texas

calling mr. smith

I am both disheartened and disgusted as a lifelong Democrat to learn that my own senator has been ripping off the taxpayers just as badly as any GOP member ever has.

I rejoiced at the recent election. As with many of my fellow citizens, I’m fed up with the lies and policies of the current administration. I did not, however, vote for the same old crap with a new name. We want reform. We want honesty. Diane Feinstein, you should at least be censured by the Senate, and at most leave the Senate.

This is not the first time your ethics have been brought into question. Many years ago, you voted for students to get tuition and books paid for to those fly-by-night colleges. Your husband owned some of those, did he not?

Enough! No representative or senator should be allowed to skate by doing this kind of blatant dishonest behavior. It’s about time that both parties clean house. We need Mr. Smith to go to Washington again!

Kama M. Scott, Disgusted Voter, Reseda

crony stink

I’m in the process of moving out of Marin, but I wanted to thank you for your article. The very fact that someone has the courage to approach these issues with regard to this woman is encouraging. Sen. Feinstein was right in line voting for the Iraq war and, when Israel invaded Lebanon, she held a rally in S.F. and spoke in favor of this attack. I have not voted for the senator in two elections now because she stinks of cronyism and certainly is not representing the people of the Bay Area in her pro-war stance and her support of Israel. One painful irony is that following her vote for the Iraqi war, an elementary school was named for her in San Francisco. How many of those children, I wrote to her at the time, will die in the fields of Iraq or some other country in the Middle East due to her vote?

I would so appreciate seeing you pursue both Feinstein and Schwarzenegger in their continued cozying up to oil and big corporate interests before our state is completely taken out of the control of those of us who love her deeply. Keep up the good work. I will continue to read you, only online from now on.

Gloria Simms, Leaving Mill Valley

unleashing byrne

I am glad to see Peter Byrne unleashed once again on a hunt for evidence of graft and corruption continually squashed by larger papers and most other media far less courageous in the San Francisco Bay Area.

He has yet again done a superb job here. Frankly, we all need to remove officials who use the system for familial personal gain, as he well proves.

Janet Campbell, San Francisco

absolutely stunning

Peter Byrne’s fact-laden investigative report is absolutely stunning and beautifully presented. It’s Pulitzer quality and I would seriously hope that the New York Times and Washington Post reprint it in full immediately.

While we may have differing views on other issues, I certainly salute excellent investigative journalism, including the attendant diligence and courage required to produce what Byrne just did.

Bravo!

Elaine Willman, National Chair, Citizens Equal Rights Alliance

cut the cord!

Any in Congress who have a conflict of interest, questionable behavior or an ethical problem should be dismissed from any committee that is related to that problem. Sen. Feinstein is only one example. There are probably others with similar problems. The umbilical cord to special interests must be severed. We must elect people who are public servants and not corrupt politicians.

Joseph Rizzuto, Los Gatos


Morsels

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If wine really is bottled poetry, as Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote,then San Francisco’s Fort Mason was worth a bazillion words during the 16th annual Zinfandel Advocates and Producers (ZAP) Festival held Jan. 24-28.

The gates opened at 1pm on Saturday, Jan. 27, for the grand all-day tasting, and throngs of thirsty wine tasters flooded forward into the Herbst and Festival pavilions like eager souls into Heaven. Up to their necks in wine, they waded from table to table and winery to winery, swirling, sipping and swallowing until their tongues went numb and such back-of-the-bottle prose as “hinting at rose petals,” “aromas of vanilla and saffron” and “the perfect match for braised pork loin” could have been hard truth or downright drivel. It was impossible to know. Everyone was intoxicated. The world was spinning.

My tasting mate and I dove into the Festival Pavilion and swam straight to the table of Sharp Cellars (www.sharpcellars.com; 707.933.0556). This Sonoma winery, owned by Vance Sharp III, produces just several thousand cases per year. The wine is not cheap, but the flavor of its 2001 100 percent pure blend Zin ($45 per bottle) is the spiciest, sweetest and most remarkable I have ever tasted. Think really, really excellent vinegar. Sounds bad, but it’s great. Plus, it’s certified organic.

I slogged forward in search of more eco-friendly wine, and I noticed how visibly nervous the winemakers got when asked if their grapes were organic. Their bodies stiffened and their faces grew dark, as though I had accused them of bottling up poison, which I guess I sort of had.

While ZAP is a celebration of Zinfandel, it’s also a celebration of great food. On the evening of Thursday the 25th at Fort Mason, the ZAP Good Eats and Zinfandel Pairing event brought together over 50 wineries and restaurants to produce many mouth-watering, innovative wine-food combos. The featured chefs–mad and brilliant scientists of flavor–grilled up heaps and hills and mountains of meat, meat, meat, meat, meat! They drizzled this seared flesh with Mediterranean delights like fig-pear chutney, pomegranate reduction, rosemary gravy and secret barbecue sauces using–get this!–Zinfandel.

ZAP 2007, with its 270 participating wineries, 600 or so Zins and excess of rich food left me almost speechless for a day afterward. Robert Louis Stevenson probably could have written a charming poem about the wine-sopped week. Or just copied something from the back of a bottle. Nobody would have known.

For info on more ZAP, visit the website at www.zinfandel.org.



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Lifer

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music & nightlife |

By Gabe Meline

Life on the road can be a smorgasbord of hijinks and mayhem for a punk-rock singer, but when I think back to a two-month period spent with Russ Rankin traveling across Europe, I recall an unusually centered personality who just happened to get onstage every night to scream his head off. It is a testament to his calmness that only a few small details remain lodged in my memory: dedicated to punk rock as a whole, his favorite albums include 7 Seconds’ The Crew, Consolidated’s Friendly Fascism and Government Issue’s Boycott Stabb. His personal ethics lean strongly toward veganism and straightedge (a tattoo on his leg shows the Statue of Liberty pouring out a liquor bottle), and a portion of the proceeds from his music is charitably donated to Food Not Bombs. He’s no stranger to a good laugh, and one of his favorite movies, viewed over and over between reading Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, is the Paul Newman ice-hockey farce Slap Shot.

Rankin is what those in the punk-rock scene call a “lifer,” and it’s because of his measured expulsion of energy that he still has a wealth of it left. Twenty years after the long-running punk band Good Riddance emerged as his eventual life’s work, Rankin’s idea of a good time remains getting up onstage and screaming his head off. Now, as the frontman for the more hardcore-oriented Only Crime, he’s upped his own ante. Backed by veterans of bands like Converge, GWAR and Black Flag, Rankin has sworn off any notion of pop songwriting and given himself a heavy stock in which his lyrics simmer. It’s a workout, and here’s hoping his stamina (exercised by recent turns at ice hockey, no less) can continue to keep up with his ambition.

Only Crime performs this Friday, Feb. 2, with New Mexican Disaster Squad and Snag at the Phoenix Theater. 201 E. Washington St., Petaluma. 8pm. $10. 707.762.3565.




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Wine Tasting Room of the Week

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Have you tasted a land down under? Google the locally quirky name “Petaluma” with “winery,” and most hits will be for the esteemed old Petaluma Winery in the Adelaide Hills of Australia. How a Coast Miwok term for something like “rolling hills” ended up on the kangaroo continent will have to remain a mystery for now, considering time and budget constraints. As it turns out, Sonoma County has a “down under” all of its own.

Can’t you hear, can’t you hear the thunder? It’s just the freeway below Kastania Vineyards. Next to a gas station between Petaluma and Marin County, the little vineyard on a hillock has marked the southernmost evidence of wine country viewable from Highway 101 for a decade. One a recent day, a small sign announced “Winery Open,” so we peeled off the freeway and bumped down a narrow country lane. The faded sign on the door read “Tasting by appointment,” but owner Hoot Smith appeared from the side of the little winery to greet us. Although he was in the middle of racking new wine, Smith amiably set us up with five bottles on the patio overlooking the Petaluma River, since the new tasting room bar had a new coat of overpowering varnish just at that moment.

Smith’s Pinot grapes have been vinted to acclaim, usually bought by Landmark Vineyards in Kenwood, and 2004 is Kastania’s first self-made vintage. I found the estate Pinot Noir ($35) richly colored with a clean cranberry character and gentle tannins. The Reserve Pinot ($45), is similar but with slightly smokier, meatier Pinot quality. They also put out a few cases of Proprietor’s Blend ($25) of Cab and Cab Franc, which manages to taste “green” in a good way, all fresh mint with chocolate undertones that carry it through. And just because, Smith says, you can’t get away without offering at least one white, Kastania also makes a smart Chardonnay that’s all ripe apples, no malolactic, with a little toastiness that belies a life spent in stainless, not oak.

Who knew that here on the border of Marin we’d find one of the most hospitable, no-nonsense family winery experience in the county!

Drive safe, and don’t chunder.

Kastania Vineyards, 4415 Kastania Road, Petaluma. 707.763.6348. Tasting by appointment.



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Shaping Sonoma Grove

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Shaping Sonoma Grove

Photograph by Robbi Pengelly
Still standing: Alice McAdams has lived at the Sonoma Grove for a quarter of a century and intends to stay regardless of the changes.

By Patricia Lynn Henley

The do-your-own-thing spirit of the hippie era keeps a toehold in Rohnert Park, thanks to an agreement between a group of tenants and the owner who bought the 152-unit Sonoma Grove Trailer Park a little over a year ago.

“I think both sides worked hard to come to a settlement that we can live with,” says Candace Birchfield, a Grove resident since 1983. “Both sides had to make compromises.”

As reported in these pages a year ago (“Home, Sweet Trailer,” Jan. 25, 2006), Sonoma Grove is a hidden haven of laid-back serenity in southern Sonoma County. For decades, the Grove was an out-of-the-mainstream retreat whose residents lived extremely low-cost lives in a hodgepodge of vintage trailers and RVs, most augmented by hand-built decks and entry halls, long-established gardens and various whimsical accoutrements. Residents who had enjoyed the Grove’s funky charm were up in arms last year at new owners who had intended to purchase an RV park–not a commune. Conflicting visions remain of what the Grove is and will be.

After Houser Holdings LLC bought the Grove in November 2005, rules were tightened and rent increases announced, with some jumping more than 100 percent. A number of residents left. About 20 followed the advice of lawyers and organized a rent strike, which led to a flurry of eviction proceedings. More residents moved out.

After nearly a year of friction, a deal was struck. Exact details of the legal settlement are confidential, but all of the long-term residents who remain in Sonoma Grove–about 80 or so–have had to move to the southern end of the 5.5-acre property, leaving the north portion free to operate as an RV park for people passing through.

One thing that hasn’t been settled is how the Grove is viewed. The owners say that legally it is and always has been an RV park, but residents see the Grove as the home of a special, almost magical community.

“It can take you back to another place and time,” explains Linda Robbins, who’s lived in the tree-shaded Grove for more than eight years. “You think differently in a place like this. You see things differently. You relate differently.”

“The world out there is so fast-paced, and it’s all about upping the Joneses, about having a new car,” adds Alice McAdams, who’s spent 25 years in Sonoma Grove in her 38-foot trailer. “We can live at a simpler pace here, and it doesn’t make it wrong.”

For Teresa Thurman, a co-owner of Houser Holdings LLC, Sonoma Grove is simply one of only three RV parks in Sonoma County with what she considers an “ideal” location for tourists. A Lakeport resident, Thurman presents herself as a wife and mother of two small children who is simply trying to earn a living. “We’re a business,” she says. “We’re an RV park. People want to come to stay here.”

A rumor floating around the Grove says the property will soon be sold to developers.

“We never bought the park to develop it. That’s [an idea] that was created by someone else,” Thurman says. “It is what it is. It’s an RV park. We have no plans to do anything else.”

Thurman says that she intends to make the north end of the Grove more up-to-date and attractive to overnight guests, but doesn’t know exactly what will be done. “We’re still making those decisions.”

Grove residents are waiting to see what will be happen next. Some are anxious because, under the settlement, Thurman could increase the rents in September.

“Technically, she can raise the rents to $650 a month and still be within the limits of low-income housing. But what we are is extremely low-income tenants,” explains Ian Southerland, who moved to the Grove in his fifth-wheel trailer four years ago. For him and others, $650 is too much.

“I’d like to live here for the rest of my days,” he adds. “In reality, I think we’ve only been given a reprieve. If she chooses to raise the rent to a point where I can’t afford it, I’ll have to move. The majority of the people here are living on $800 to $900 a month.”

Thurman is sympathetic but businesslike. She hopes to keep things affordable, but it’s normal, she says, for a landlord to increase the rent each year; the Grove is no exception. “Their concerns are legitimate, but they aren’t any different than those of anyone who is renting.”

That won’t be an issue until September. Meanwhile, there’s a tentative peace. “We all came together at a Christmas party, and I was very happy to see that we were all able to break bread,” Thurman says.

At least one resident is still facing eviction proceedings, but for the others, things are relatively calm, at least for the moment. Many feel the struggle to stand up for their rights strengthened their sense of being a special community.

“I think we really did accomplish something that’s really amazing,” Birchfield says. “I’m sort of speechless. We didn’t waver. We hung in there and we saw it through to its most logical conclusion at this point in time.

“I think we’re very lucky to still be here.”


Prophet Motifs

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Prophet Motifs

the arts | visual arts |

Design 2007:
Hello Creative | Russian Orthodox Frescoes | Drawing as the New Design

Icon: The art of the fresco is at least 4,000 years old.

By Bruce Robinson

When Michelangelo was painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he was using what was even then an old and well-established medium. Frescoes are paintings done on wet plaster, and despite their historic antiquity, they are not just a thing of the past.

Among the contemporary practitioners of this ancient art form is Father Simon Dolan, a 49-year-old monk at the St. Gregory of Sinai monastery near Kelseyville, who, for the past nine years, has been painting a series of fresco murals at the St. Seraphim of Sarov Orthodox Church in south Santa Rosa.

“People have been painting in fresco for at least 4,000 years,” Dolan says, “and I don’t think we’re using it in any way that is substantially different from the way it has been done historically.”

Standing beneath the classical dome that rises 40 feet above the chapel floor, Dolan, a robust yet scholarly figure with a full beard, dressed in a simple black smock that extends to his shins, surveys the lifetime of work that awaits him there.

“Painting a church involves literally hundreds of large-scale paintings,” he explains. “We are going to paint from the very top of the dome all the way down to the floor. So all the walls, all of the arches, all of the pillars, everything except for the wooden timber roof will eventually, God willing, be painted in fresco.”

Fresco painting uses a special plaster made from lime putty, which is created by burning limestone and then plunging the residue, known as quicklime, into water and storing it there. When it’s time to paint, the wet lime putty is mixed into plaster and applied–only as much as can be done in a single day, perhaps an area of 12 or 16 square feet, depending on the amount of detail in the image–and allowed to partially dry before the painting begins.

“Fresco,” Dolan notes, “is an Italian word meaning ‘fresh.’ So what is fresh in the painting is the plaster that is freshly laid. And we’re painting directly on it.”

The first step in that process involves drawing a full-size outline or “cartoon” of the image to be painted. This is transferred to the wet plaster and serves as a guide while the paints are applied. Traditionally, the pigments are natural materials, derived mainly from colored soils, although some manufactured pigments are now available. But it is the chemistry of the lime putty plaster that gives fresco paintings their remarkable durability.

When the lime putty is mixed and spread on the wall, it begins to reabsorb from the air a molecule of carbon that it lost when the limestone was burned. As the plaster dries, “an invisible layer of carbonate crystals forms on the surface of the plaster,” Simon explains. “And any pigments that are ground in water and placed onto the wall while the carbonate crystals are forming become part of the wall itself.”

This requires quick and accurate work, he adds, because “every minute counts and every brush stroke is permanent.” Changes or corrections can only be made by chiseling away the dried plaster, and repeating the whole process.

Large images, such as the dome or an extensive interior wall surface, are done in a series of smaller sections. The borders or “joins” between these sections usually follow the outline of a figure or a line in the drawing, and so become virtually invisible after the sections have cured together.

And there’s another, almost supernatural aspect of the process that happens a bit later.

“A painter does his painting, and over the course of the next few days, without touching the painting, it gets better,” Dolan affirms, smiling at the thought. “As it dries, the plaster that’s underneath the colors becomes a bright white. And so it imparts a kind of luminosity to the colors.”

St. Seraphim’s is a new church building, completed in 1996. But from the beginning of the planning process, it was envisioned as “a grand palette for the fresco work,” says Father Lawrence Margitich, who has led the 70-year-old congregation since 1985. As part of the church design process, the congregation and the artist developed a detailed plan for all of the art that will eventually cover every available surface above the floor. These images, often portraying disciples and other biblical figures as well as numerous saints and prophets, are known more precisely as religious icons, and many have remained essentially unchanged through the centuries.

“Elements of it go right back to the early Christian era,” Father Dolan elaborates. “We can find examples of images that look very similar to what we’re painting here in the Christian catacombs.” Some of the images in those subterranean Christian graveyards date back to the first century A.D.

But icons, in this context, are anything but abstractions. Even the faces of the hundreds of saints recognized by the Orthodox Church represent a form of stylized portraiture.

“These people existed, and so when they’re painted, they’re painted to look as they looked in life,” Simon asserts. “The Church preserves their appearance down through the centuries, handing over that tradition from one generation to another.” Yet within that tradition, “there’s an astonishing kind of variety,” Dolan continues. From church to church and from one artist to the next, “you have unity, but you don’t have uniformity.”

To Father Margitich, the iconographic images represent “the teachings of the church in color and shape.” In fact, he sees the entire church building as a three-dimensional icon in its own right. “It’s an image of heaven, you could say, the kingdom of God populated by saints–religious people from all walks of life–and you are surrounded by them.”

Dolan began his study of iconography as a young art student, and followed it into the church itself. He has been painting murals and wooden icon panels for orthodox churches since 1980, and is now dividing his fresco-painting time between St. Seraphim and another, smaller church in the rural south of France. Together, they will represent his life’s work.

“A muralist doesn’t have but one or two churches in his lifetime,” Dolan says placidly. He looks at the myriad blank spaces that still surround the spacious sanctuary, and the high arc of the dome, where the outlines of the more elaborate artwork to come are already sketched in place. “We’ve been working here for a number of years and we’re maybe a fifth done.”

St. Seraphim of Sarov Church, 90 Mountain View Ave., Santa Rosa. 707.584.9491.



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The Byrne Report

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0

January 31-February 6, 2007

Last year, Wikipedia blocked congressional staffers from editing Wiki entries on their bosses after an employee of Sen. Dianne Feinstein changed certain references to her war-contractor husband, Richard C. Blum. For example, Feinstein’s office excised Wiki’s account of the $190,000 fine she paid for not disclosing that Blum underwrote her political campaigns.

Following the Wiki crackdown, a website devoted to creating bios of congressional members was born: Congresspedia.org. Democrat Feinstein’s Congresspedia page paints her as being politically courageous and full of ethical grace. But conversely, Republican senator James Inhofe’s Congresspedia blurb details his sins, including his support for torturing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Congresspedia is edited by the Center for Media and Democracy as a “joint project” with the Sunlight Foundation.

The nonprofit Sunlight Foundation was founded and bankrolled last year by Blum’s longtime business partner, attorney Michael R. Klein. They co-own Astar Air Cargo, which holds defense contracts to service military bases, including Gitmo. Other war-contracting firms in which Blum was a majority shareholder have regularly wrung billions of dollars out of military appropriations that were overseen by Feinstein.

In a telephone interview in September, Klein told me, “I’ve known Dick [Blum] for a long, long time. One of my roles in life has been to make sure that, when he wakes up in the morning, he doesn’t do something that embarrasses his wife. And, to the extent that I can, to make sure that, when she wakes up in the morning, she doesn’t do something to embarrass herself, or him.” (Our Jan. 24 cover feature, details how Klein, as a board member of Perini Corp., a defense contractor then controlled by Blum, repeatedly updated Feinstein on Perini projects coming before her as legislation.)

Klein says the goal of the Sunlight Foundation is to “disinfect” Congress by funding watchdog groups and investigative journalism. He shares the board of directors with Nicholas J. Klein and Ellen S. Miller. The latter is a journalist who founded the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), a nonprofit that tracks campaign donations, lobbyist activities and functions as a reliable source of data for investigative journalists.

Sunlight’s advisory board includes Kim Malone, the director of online sales for AdSense at Google; Esther Dyson, who blogs for the Huffington Post; and Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.com. A section of Sunlight’s website is devoted to creating blog tags for “your Google homepage,” so it is obvious why Malone is involved. Ditto for Dyson, who is an Internet venture capitalist. Newmark, however, is an icon of electronic self-empowerment. I e-mailed him to inquire if he is aware of how Klein makes his living. He did not reply.

In its first year of existence, Sunlight gave out more than $1.6 million in “transparency grants” to ethics watchdog groups, such as Ellen Miller’s CRP ($796,000); OMB Watch, which oversees the government’s Office of Management and Budget ($334,000); the Center for Media and Democracy ($95,000); ReadtheBill.org ($200,000); Dan Gilmore’s Center for Citizen Media ($25,000); and Arizona Congresswatch ($1,650). Journalists may submit individual grant proposals online to Klein.

The money has funded worthwhile activities. OMB Watch used its Kleinbucks to partner with Eagle Eye Publishers, a for-profit company based in Fairfax, Va., that sells search capabilities on federal databases. The resulting contract data obtainable online from www.fedspending.org is useful. ReadtheBill.org and MapLight.org (recipient of $77,000 Kleinbucks) have created free online access to state and federal legislation. And Miller’s CRP used the grant to streamline a searchable database of lobbying and campaign records.

Miller is cofounder and executive director of the Sunlight Foundation. She is still a board member of the CRP, however, which raises a conflict-of-interest question. The IRS generally frowns on leaders of nonprofit foundations steering tax-free dollars to outside organizations in which they have a governing interest. In a telephone interview, Miller explained, “The question of self-dealing is irrelevant, because I am not paid by the CRP.” She says she is aware of Klein’s defense-contracting activities.

For many years, Klein represented Blum’s interest as the vice-chairman of the board of directors of Perini Corp., which holds more than $2.5 billion in military construction contracts in the global war on terror. Klein is also a member of the board of directors of SRA International, which earned $776 million from the federal government last year for such tasks as performing technology- and strategic-consulting services for national security programs.

But it is Klein’s co-ownership with Blum of Astar Air Cargo that has furrowed more than a few brows inside the Beltway. Astar is the U.S.-based arm of DHL Worldwide Express (DHLWE), a German-owned air freight service. According to a May 2003 Astar press release, “The airline operates 40 aircraft in the United States or abroad for the United States Air Force, and was actively engaged in providing service to the U.S. Department of Defense during the Iraqi conflict. The airline currently serves the U.S. military with missions to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; Roosevelt Roads, Puerto Rico; Ramstein Air Force Base, Germany; and other military bases around the world.”

The complicated circumstances in which Klein and Blum acquired Astar prompted competitors FedEx and UPS to formally complain to the federal government, claiming that Astar is a front for the German government. The Congressional Research Service investigated the matter and made a report to Congress in December 2003 that related the following facts:

  • Foreign corporations are not allowed to directly deliver air freight inside the United States.
  • In 2001, DHLWE was acquired by the German Post Office (Deutsche Post AG), which made it problematic for DHLWE to deliver packages inside American territory.
  • The Department of Transportation (DOT) ruled in May 2002 that DHLWE could operate in the U.S. as a “citizen.” But in March 2003, the Congressional Research Service’s report stated that the Inspector General found that “the informal review process employed by the DOT was not well-suited to the evaluation of DHL Airways’ citizenship.”
  • In April 2003, Congress earmarked the Emergency Wartime Supplemental Appropriations Act with a special provision that required DHLWE’s American delivery arm to be majority owned by U.S. citizens. The bill also ordered the DOT to conduct another review of the matter.
  • Shortly thereafter, Klein and Blum purchased control of DHLWE’s domestic delivery arm with $50 million from Boeing Capital. They renamed it Astar Air Cargo. The gargantuan loan was guaranteed by Deutsch Post AG.
  • Nevertheless, in December 2003, the DOT ruled that Astar meets citizenship requirements because it is controlled by Klein and Blum. The favorable ruling allowed Astar’s parent company the right to operate in the U.S. and to obtain military contracts.

    • The Congressional Research Service pointed out that Klein was a partner in Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, the Washington, D.C.-based law firm that simultaneously represented DHLWE, Deutsche Post AG and Astar Air Cargo. The report suggested that Astar was potentially controlled by the Deutsche Post AG given its legal bedfellows. Therefore, Klein’s potential conflict of interest could have reasonably disallowed Astar Air Cargo from operating inside the U.S. and contracting with the Department of Defense.

    In summary, Klein, a member of the powerful law firm representing a foreign-owned corporation, bought a part of that corporation with a loan from a major defense contractor in partnership with the husband of a U.S. senator who directly oversaw military appropriations.

    This, then, is the war-contractor-cum-media-philanthropist who is systematically purchasing control over the agendas of congressional watchdog groups and investigative journalists who are supposed to keep on eye on this type of shenanigan.

    or


    Snakes and Virgins

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    Snakes and Virgins

    January 24-30, 2007

    LaSara FireFox is a first-class flirt.

    I know this already from perusing her website (www.lasara.us), but I’ve been witnessing it first-hand over the last 45 minutes, during which FireFox–author, workshop leader, pagan priestess and self-described flirt goddess–charms, bedazzles and beguiles the handsome young waiter who, consequently, has been giving us–well, her–very attentive service.

    “Yeah, I’ve been flirting with him since the minute we walked in,” grins FireFox. “It hasn’t been hard to do. He clearly wants to be flirted with. He’s a pretty good flirter, too.”

    FireFox (real name? you decide!) is the author of the upcoming guidebook Ecstatic Flirting: Playing at the Edge of Self. She authored 2005’s provocative book Sexy Witch, described as a magical guide to female self-empowerment. A practicing therapist and relationship counselor currently based in Ukiah, FireFox has developed a side-specialty in that mysterious art of initial human connection otherwise known as flirting. She shares her experience through a series of two-day “FlirtShops” in which participants learn the nuts and bolts of effective flirting, both the romantic kind that could lead to a date and a romp in the sack, and the nonromantic kind that makes you the light of the party and the star of the boardroom.

    We’ve just seen the electrifying movie-musical Dreamgirls, a critical and box-office hit about the rise and fall of a 1960s girl group. The films stars Beyoncé as Deena, the soft-spoken backup singer who becomes the lead diva of the group, Jennifer Hudson as Effie, the powerhouse vocalist whose ejection from the group sends her on a dangerous downward spiral, Jamie Foxx as Curtis Taylor, the group’s charmingly manipulative manager (and the lover of more than one of the Dreamgirls), and Eddie Murphy, as the James Brown-ish James Thunder Early, a hedonistic R&B singer with whom the Dreamette’s get their first break as backup singers. Throughout the film, all of these characters sing, dance, strut, schmooze, smile, debate, demand, back-talk and charm their way in and out of beds, cars, relationships, jobs, recording contracts and a series of first, second and third chances.

    And do these people ever know how to flirt! In FireFox’s expert view, the entire film works as a big-screen flirtation textbook, an illustration of classic flirting styles, both recommended and not.

    “There were definitely a lot of different archetypes of flirting going on in this movie,” she says, slicing into a big piece of apple pie. “Everyone had a very different flirting style. Effie, for example, was a very direct flirter. She knew what she wanted, and she knew that to get what she wanted she had to just say it, to put it right out there. With a smile. That’s one of my favorite flirting styles, personally. The direct approach, because, hey, why beat around the bush, right?

    “The way that someone flirts is not different from the way they are in the rest of their lives,” FireFox explains. “The way Effie flirts is the same way she sings, just putting it all out there. Ideally, your flirt style will be a natural extension of who you are. I’m not into the manipulation of others in order to get laid or get a job or whatever. I believe that flirting should be rooted in honesty.”

    As an example, Jamie Foxx’s Curtis is manipulative and deceitful from the get-go, paying off a promoter so the Dreamgirls lose a talent contest (thus making them believe they need his management services), and, according to FireFox, his flirting style was aggressively dishonest as well.

    “He was a snake–or even better, he was a chameleon,” she says, “changing his pitch with every new circumstance, the way a chameleon changes colors. He was willing to hurt people. I don’t believe you can do someone harm and not have it affect you, and that goes for the way you flirt. If you flirt in a way that deceives and manipulates and harms other people, you might get a little more action in the short run, but in the long run, you could easily end up alone.”

    Eddie Murphy’s James Early is, as a flirter, a whole lot like Effie.

    “He is also very direct,” FireFox notes. “His ethical structure is a little bit dubious, but he is nowhere near as corrupt as the Jamie Foxx character. He just wanted what he wanted. He is a lot more genuine in how he flirted than Jamie Foxx, just right there in his desire all the time. He wasn’t lying about what he wanted, and though he didn’t enjoy talking about his wife to whomever he was trying to seduce, he wasn’t going to lie about having a wife, either.”

    And finally, what about Deena, who allows herself to be molded and shaped by the man she loves, and who pursues the people she wants by waiting until they decide to pursue her?

    “That’s a very interesting one,” says FireFox. “She’s the Virgin. That’s her archetype, and that’s her flirting style. She was literally a virgin–the last one of the girls to start fucking around–and then not until she married Jamie Foxx. She started out all insecure, the backup singer believing she didn’t have what it takes to be the lead, and then after she becomes a full-scale diva–even though she’s more confident in her dealings with people–she still has that edge of chastity, with all of that practiced coyness and eyelash batting, and she uses that in her flirting. Because every guy wants a virgin who’s also–like the lyrics of a song I heard last night–a ‘freak in the bed.’ The Virgin is a classic, classic flirting style.”

    Of them all, FireFox would have the give the award for Most Effective Flirter–if “effective” were defined as getting what you set out to get–to the Eddie Murphy character.

    “He was really a very confident flirt,” FireFox allows. “When the girl says no after the first week, he says to himself, ‘I guess it’s gonna take two weeks.’ It took longer than two weeks, but he got there.”

    His flirting skills also worked on entire audiences, as when he does a funky, crowd-pleasing dance on national TV, culminating with Murphy dropping his pants.

    “Dropping his pants was a little much,” FireFox laughs. “Generally, when your flirting with someone, don’t just suddenly drop your pants. Not such a good technique. That’s a good rule. Don’t drop your pants. Not in the first five minutes, anyway.”


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