Ringing in 2007 should be a cinch this year, especially if it’s prix fixe you’re after. Here are just three restaurants from the many that are making the last night of the year count. At press time, reservations were still available, but probably not for long.
With a Michelin star and a regular spot in the Chronicle’s Top 100 Restaurants, it’s a foregone conclusion that Farm House Inn & Restaurant will deliver a delicate balance of romantic ambiance and palate-friendly, Cal-French delectables. The menu’s not out yet, but based on last year’s fare, we predict that high-class ingredients, like truffles, foie gras, chanterelles and lobster, will find their way into the sturdy fare that includes mashed potatoes, lamb and Angus beef. After dinner, head back to the room, toast and watch a more frenetic celebration in Times Square. 7871 River Road, Forestville. Four-course prix-fixe 5:30pm-7pm; $99. Five-course prix-fixe reservations begin at 7pm; $129. 707.887.3300.
For those with a fix for French comfort food, Left Bank Larkspur offers a five-course prix fixe, including something called lobster cappuccino. Also intriguing are the bone marrow bordelaise and asparagus flan that accompany filet de boeuf au poivre. Eat like a cochon at this brasserie, nestled in the old Blue Rock Inn. 507 Magnolia Ave., Larkspur. $60, includes glass of Champagne. 415.927.3331.
Pat Kuleto’s lodge-style eatery, the Martini House purveys a five-course prix fixe, including such wonders as aquavit-cured salmon, warm salad of hedgehog mushrooms and roasted Jerusalem artichokes, crispy sweetbreads, foie gras ravioli and Sonoma duck breast. Now, this is decadent! A Champagne toast at midnight is also promised. 1245 Spring St. at Oak (one block west of Main Street), St. Helena. Seatings at 7:30pm, 8pm and 8:30pm, and the table is reserved for you for the evening. $150; $215 includes sommelier wine pairing. 707.963.2233.
Quick dining snapshots by Bohemian staffers.
Winery news and reviews.
Food-related comings and goings, openings and closings, and other essays for those who love the kitchen and what it produces.
Recipes for food that you can actually make.
Letters to the Editor
Local dialogue
Kudos to Michael Shapiro for the heartfelt and informative piece on in the Made in the North Bay annual local gift guide (Dec. 6). However, I’d be careful about assuming too quickly that online sales threaten local merchants. After all, such sales allow many such merchants to reach customers beyond those merchants’ physical locations, making them more competitive, not less. Online shopping can be a boon to local merchants, depending on the merchants and their markets. Summarily criticizing online sales for the demise of local merchants sounds a bit like stiffing the server because the restaurant chef screwed up your meal–something we locals would never do, yes?
Michael Dortch, Santa Rosa
Michael Shapiro responds: It’s true local stores can develop a national presence by selling online, though it’s hard for a local bookstore, for example, to compete with the resources and marketing muscle of Amazon.com. But you’re right that we shouldn’t overlook buying online as a way to support independent stores. It can be easier to find used, rare and out-of-print books online than in local stores, but you can still support independents. Recently, I was looking for Paul Scott’s four-volume Raj Quartet and found the books at Powells.com, a big independent bookstore in Portland. The four books cost $25 including shipping, so yes, I agree online has its place.
A key point in my story last week was the unfair playing field: if you go to Copperfield’s you have to pay sales tax; if you buy online from Amazon, you don’t. Because shipping is free in many cases, the customer often pays 8 percent less when buying online. This unfair advantage should be rectified, not just to help local independent stores but to put taxes back in state coffers to pay for much-needed services.
No more monkey business
What a joy it is to read that three chimpanzees used by a Hollywood animal trainer are to be relinquished to a sanctuary [as a result of a recent lawsuit filed by the Animal Legal Defense Fund]. They’ll finally know what it is to live without fear. In order to be trained to perform in ads, movies and television shows, chimpanzees are removed from their mothers at birth, a profoundly traumatic event for both. The stress of separation can leave lifetime emotional scars and impede normal development. Eyewitnesses at facilities that train (i.e., break) great apes have reported seeing baby chimpanzees and orangutans severely beaten with fists, rocks and broom handles. Beatings are routine to ensure that the animals remain fearful and obedient. Once they reach eight years of age, these animals are too strong to be controlled. As a result, older animals are often discarded at shabby roadside zoos where they may live in squalor for decades. Chimps may live to be 50 to 60 years old.
Animals do not belong on the set.
Jennifer O’Connor, PETA Campaign writer, Norfolk, VA.
Beyond Google’s Terrible Powers
Hi from England. Please could anyone help me with a riddle? When I was a very young child, I saw a film where an angel gives a man in jail the next day’s paper. I have no idea of the title of the film but can remember that one scene. I wonder, with all the old films being released on DVD, that I might find out the film’s title and buy it. I hope that someone may be able to pin-point it, as my dear hubby is getting a bit fed up watching so many old films just so I can find that one film.
If you know, please write:
22 Broomhill Ave., Keighly
West Yorkshire, England
BD211BW
Yvonne Moran, Merry Olde
Whamola!
By Matt Pamatmat
There is footage on the Primus DVD Animals Should Not Try to Act Like People where, during the band’s classic “My Name Is Mud,” multiple Les Claypools assault the stage with bass guitars, imitators mimicking the Primus frontman’s gangly knee-stomp. It’s a good analogy for Claypool, whose post-Primus years have seen him in various and seemingly unending configurations: musician, novelist, mockumentarian.
Like Pink Floyd’s crazy diamond, Claypool remains a many-faceted renaissance man, mutating and evolving over the years but always keeping some trademark thread that runs through all he does, that permeates whatever media he works in. As I found out by getting the chance to talk with him on the phone, he is not the stereotypical rock star; he’s articulate, even eloquent, down-to-earth and self-deprecating, a seriously talented individual but one who doesn’t take himself, or anything, too seriously.
From the early days of Primus, originally called Primate, when Claypool would slink across the stage giving his trademark hand-shaking wave to the audience, to his various collaborations with an eclectic cast of musicians, he has remained a wellspring of creativity and a raconteur of the seedier, weirder side of existence. This Dec. 31, he brings his traditionally unpredictable annual New Year’s Eve bash to the North Bay.
Since the early ’90s, Claypool and his family have called the North Bay home. As he sings in the Primus song “Coddingtown”: “Moved on up to Sono-Co to clear my head of smog.” North Bay references figure prominently in Claypool’s songs, from Del Davis’ Christmas Tree farm on Highway 116 to D’s Diner in Sebastopol. The video for the Primus song “Jerry Was a Racecar Driver” was filmed at Petaluma’s battleworn Phoenix Theater.
Unlike musicians who unsuccessfully break free of a popular band to pursue solo interests, Claypool’s talents have only diversified over time. An iconoclastic artist always with a new trick up his sleeve, Claypool has used his down time from Primus to swap ideas and record with musicians as diverse as the Police’s Stewart Copeland, Funkadelic and later Talking Heads keyboardist Bernie Worrell, KFC-container-wearing guitarist Buckethead, Phish’s Trey Anastasio and others. These collaborations have also resulted in some interesting band names, as the Worrell, Buckethead and (second Primus drummer) Brain project was dubbed Colonel Claypool’s Bucket of Bernie Brains. By occasionally engaging in other pursuits, the bassist has helped keep Primus relevant while allowing time for members to explore new dimensions, as with original drummer Tim Alexander’s latest band, Fata Morgana.
Of late, Claypool directed and starred in a mockumentary about the jam-band scene, Electric Apricot: Quest for Festeroo (partially filmed in Marin County), as well as sitting down to write the novel South of the Pumphouse and releasing the album Of Whales and Woe. Claypool cites Bukowski, David Sedaris, Terence McKenna and Groucho Marx, among others, as literary influences. The novel, Claypool’s first, is in its fifth printing.
“I had someone throw a copy of Pumphouse at the taxicab I was leaving in,” Claypool said on the phone from home, where he is recuperating after a recent combined book and Primus tour. “I wasn’t able to sign their copy and had to get going, and they were pretty pissed,” he chuckles.
Not long after Animals Should Not hit the stores, Claypool released a DVD showcasing his solo and post-Primus collaborations, 5 Gallons of Diesel, the title of which comes from a line in the brutal, postapocalyptic, oh-shit-we-ran-out-of-oil sci-fi film Road Warrior. “The movie theater where I grew up would show it late at night,” he explains. “If there wasn’t anything else to do, we’d go see Road Warrior.”
Then there is Claypool’s traditional New Year’s Eve shows. Decked out in creative raiment, he holds an almost messianic sway over his flock, his bass an instrument of truth as he leads his so-called fancy band. Claypool has been known in past New Years’ to celebrate with a bellyful of magic mushrooms. Part of the tradition is a “best hat” contest, making New Year’s shows with Claypool a surreal distant cousin of Sunday at a Baptist church.
Claypool’s band features members who helped him–circa the Fearless Flying Frog Brigade era–perform Pink Floyd’s bitter concept album Animals live in its entirety. This year, Claypool’s 16th time hosting, should be especially festive, with the recent political thumping of the neo-cons sure to make the outspoken, left-leaning Claypool smile. A Willy Wonka of a newer, less innocent age, Claypool nonetheless gives us reason to hope–or at least to bounce up and down.
Les Claypool’s New Year’s Eve Hatter’s Ball is slated for Sunday, Dec. 31, from 7pm. With DJ Malarkey, the New Orleans Social Club–featuring George Porter Jr., Leo Nocentelli, Ivan Neville, Henry Butler and Raymond Weber–members of the Meters and the Neville Brothers–and funny funksters the Coup. Santa Rosa Fairgrounds Grace Pavilion, 1375 Bennett Valley Road, Santa Rosa. $50-$100; all ages. Vehicle camping available. 707.861.2035.
First Bite
The Slow Food movement is sweeping the nation, and I’m planning accordingly. I’m buying as much stock in olive oil as I can.
Slow Food chefs are nuts for the stuff. They treat it like fine wine, identifying the fruits’ appellation and vintage, crafting meticulous tasting notes, and pairing it with food based on each oil’s flavor, fragrance and even color.
If there’s any chance to use a little olive oil in a recipe, a Slow Food chef will. And if it’s possible to use a whole lot of olive oil, don’t put it past a Slow pro to open the floodgates.
Case in point: the Slow Food temple Bovolo, set within the Plaza Farms gourmet grocery/epicurean gift shop in Healdsburg (bovolo is Italian for “snail,” and the snail is the Slow Food logo). All the food at this charming restaurant is artisan, made from scratch using Northern California-sourced ingredients. Bovolo’s people appreciate good olive oil, particularly that produced by Healdsburg’s own DaVero, made from trees imported from Tuscany. (DaVero, in fact, shares retail space in Plaza Farms.)
Now, I adore great olive oil, and as luck would have it, my mom and I visited Bovolo in November, just in time for DaVero’s “Olio Nuovo” fresh press of the year. We enjoyed a terrific lunch, leaving with olive oil coating our tongues and seeping out of our pores for days after.
Oil shimmered on the plate when I picked up my first piece of coo-coo frites, a half-dozen decadent hot pockets of pillowy Parmesan-dusted dough stuffed with explosively rich, buttery-wet mozzarella and house-cured, black pig salumi ($6.50). Oil glistened in a light green puddle atop a cup of rustic Tuscan pork stew ($4.50), thinning it into more of a porridge of kale, carrot, Parmesan and farro.
Oil perfumed the Bovolo burger, the plump ground sausage patty slicked with mustard aioli and served alongside delightfully cinnamon-y apple and onion marmelata ($9.50). Whole olives frolicked in their own happy greasiness alongside the burger and another sandwich of nicely salty proscuitto di Parma layered with nutty Bellwether Farms fontina and tangy fig jam ($8.50).
By this time, I was delighted; mom (who could last a year on just a half pat of butter) was pretty queasy. But, I promised her, every dish at Bovolo isn’t so hog-wild with oil.
We returned later for a beautiful thin-crust pizza, the 12-inch funghi ($16.50) layered with fat, sweaty wild mushrooms and tart, salty Laura Chenel goat cheese (we passed on the optional spritz of white truffle oil, $2).
A sausage sandwich ($8.50) featured undoubtedly the best link I’ve ever had in my life, the crisp skin popping and sending juices running down my chin. On top of the crunchy muffinlike roll sat fresh peppery arugula sprinkled with lots of Parmesan, pepperoncini and caramelized onion; the trick was to get the whole thing in my mouth in one bite to experience all the flavors at once.
It was a lovely, light and lively meal. We passed on the dessert special of the day, however: olive oil pound cake.
Bovolo, 106 Matheson St., Healdsburg. Breakfast, lunch and dinner served daily. 707.431.2962.
Quick-and-dirty dashes through North Bay restaurants. These aren’t your standard “bring five friends and order everything on the menu” dining reviews.
Smorgasbord of Xmas Traditions
Photograph by Brett Ascarelli
Ja! Village Bakery’s Birgitta Schofield helps to explain the elaborate holiday traditions of the far North.
By Brett Ascarelli
In Sweden, Christmas parties generally start on the first Sunday of December with Advent, and the season doesn’t officially end until mid-January. You can’t blame the Swedes for this incessant partying; they’ve got to do something to ward off nights that begin at 2:30 in the afternoon. By the time January rolls around, they can distract themselves through winter’s remaining darkness by trying to reclaim their svelte shapes from all of that Christmas herring and the potato-positive tradition of Jansson’s Temptation.
The season’s central meal is the Christmas Eve smorgasbord, or julbord. In terms of annual cornucopias, this is the equivalent of our Thanksgiving dinner. For women, it can mean a month-long stint on kitchen patrol, and after it’s all done, you roll over–a perfect sphere, just like Violet Beauregard.
This holiday season, we flagrantly use multiculti mania as an excuse to spend hours researching quirky Christmas traditions in the far, far North. Why Sweden? Perhaps the English band the Divine Comedy say it best in their song “Sweden”: “Please don’t ask me why / For if I were to give a reason /It would be a lie.”
Tradition 1: Nobel Alarm Clock The Swedes do many things well: modular furniture, gender equality and being naturally blonde, for instance. But two things they do best are the Nobel Prizes and Christmas. Once a year, these two traditions co-mingle like aquavit and caraway, in a little-known ritual that takes place on nearly the darkest day of the year.
During December’s Nobel festivities, Swedish custom mandates that freshly minted laureates shack up in style at Stockholm’s Grand Hotel. This prize week coincides with a national, pre-Christmas celebration, Santa Lucia Day, when certain young women throughout the country are selected to don white robes and candle wreaths as a reminder that light will once more come to the dark country. On this day, each Nobel award-winner gets a wake-up call from the Grand Hotel’s Santa Lucia, who processes from bedroom to bedroom with her retinue. Singing sweetly, they rouse their luminary charges with coffee and saffron buns, traditional Lucia fare.
Every once in a while, there’s a glitch. In 1930, for example, novelist Sinclair Lewis totally flipped out, screaming and ducking under the bedclothes when the young women arrived. Writers Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck are also rumored to have freaked. Luckily, Santa Lucia Day occurred last Wednesday, and so far, there have been no accounts of anything going awry with this year’s awardees.
Tradition 2: Kitchen Patrol Birgitta Schofield, owner of the Village Bakery–which has two outlets, in Santa Rosa and Sebastopol–was once upon a time voted Santa Lucia of her high school in Sweden. She remembers setting out before 5:30am on Santa Lucia Day to visit retirement homes with a thermos of coffee and spiced buns her mother had baked.
Ginger snaps, saffron buns and cardamom rolls foreground the Swedish Christmas season. Through spice trade with India and China, the Swedes developed a taste for exotic flavors that otherwise weren’t available in their chilly country. “Ginger, cardomom and saffron became a sign of wealth. As Sweden got wealthier, they trickled down to the rest of the people,” says Schofield. She pauses. “We’re crazy about cardamom!”
Tradition 3: Swedish Fish, Swedish Meatballs With more foods than presents on Santa’s list, the julbord on Christmas Eve requires a certain degree of restraint. Revelers don’t help themselves all at once, as we do at Thanksgiving. Instead, they go at it in several passes.
They begin by eating what is essentially a homage to herring. Herring was in such large supply in the waters around Sweden that some think it was wholly responsible for drawing people to settle the city of Stockholm. And even today, people would rather be fishing. Schofield’s marine biologist son brags that “the water is still so clean in Stockholm that you can still go out fishing right by the king’s castle.”
With some thousand years of accumulated cultural capital, herring has been promoted from simply a subsistence meal to a frequent festival edible. Baiting the family with three or four different types of herring on the julbord is typical, and you’ll find it salted, sherried, marinated with vinegar and spices, served with mustard sauce, herbed, pickled, smoked or in a salad. Other goodies, like boiled potatoes, hard-boiled egg, gravlax and boiled eel often accompany this course.
Landlubbers look forward to the second course: cold cuts. Among the paté, sausage salad, beet salad, cheese and cucumbers, the shining star is the Christmas ham, or julskinka. Glowing through a mustard rub and topped with an apple, the ham sits pretty on the primest real estate of the buffet table. Historically, the ham has been so integral to the julbord that, according to Swedish food consultant Michel Jamais, people living before refrigeration used to slaughter and salt the Christmas pig as early as August or September.
Cajoling distended bellies to plow on, a course of warm food takes over with Jansson’s Temptation, a baked casserole of sliced potatoes layered with onions, anchovies or sprat, and cream. Meatballs, herring dumplings, cabbage, sausages, stuffed cabbage rolls and pork ribs cheer on the appetite.
Tradition 4: Skeletons in the Closet? Michel Jamais thinks that the julbord may have evolved into its present, massive form because women wanted to provide a sponge for their men to use in absorbing their alcohol. So what about Christmas drinks in a country that was once referred to as the “vodka belt”?
Although most of the Swedish Christmas traditions are sacrosanct and immutable, the customs surrounding alcohol seem slightly more open to innovation. Swedes traditionally enjoy snaps, which refers to a distilled alcohol, similar to vodka, which is often spiced. (The bastardized form of heavily sweetened and flavored Schnapps which has sickened generations of American college kids bears little resemblance.) Snaps also refers to an activity, where a shot of aquavit, vodka or a lighter liquor is drunk during the meal with herring or as a digestive. Aquavit refers to a distilled alcohol, similar to, but more refined than, vodka, which has often been flavored with lingonberry, lemon, anise, fennel or caraway. At 80 to 90 proof, the drink, which means “water of life,” is so strong that during the Middle Ages it was believed that it could be used to bring people back from the dead.
Glancing through a book on Christmas customs, Village Bakery’s Schofield raises her eyebrows when she sees snaps recipes calling for saffron, cranberry or a combination of dill and coriander. “The snaps table has grown,” she says, noting how Swedes are experimenting more with spicing their own snaps.
Swedes tend to be big fans of snapsvisor, or drinking songs, which they do as a group prior to downing servings of snaps. The drinking songs all end in a resounding “Skål!” the Swedish version of “cheers.” Some say its etymology comes from the Vikings, who may have drunk from the skulls of their enemies. Michel Jamais, however, thinks that the saying might instead come from the word for “bowl”; in times past, a bowl of aquavit might have been passed around and each person would drink it with a spoon, rather than from individual cups.
Tradition 5: Light Bright In spite of a vast menu, Swedish Christmas is really all about light. Candelabras fill the windows there during December. There is even a tradition not unlike the Jewish menorah, where households progressively light candles on a four-armed candelabra each Sunday in December until Christmas.
It’s a dreary, coldish day outside in the North Bay, but Schofield’s lingonberry-jam-filled shop, the Village Bakery, is warm and cozy inside. Even after 40 years in the United States, she still knows how to ward off the winter with light. It’s practically a Swedish survival mechanism.
God Jul!
To learn more about the ‘julbord,’ search for ‘smorgasbord’ on Wikipedia.org, and click the link ‘The essential Julbord from Radio Sweden including recipes.’ Village Bakery, 7225 Healdsburg Ave., Sebastopol. 707.829.8101; 1445 Town and Country Drive, Santa Rosa. 707.527.7654.
SEARCH AVAILABLE RESERVATIONS & BOOK A TABLE
Quick dining snapshots by Bohemian staffers.
Winery news and reviews.
Food-related comings and goings, openings and closings, and other essays for those who love the kitchen and what it produces.
Recipes for food that you can actually make.
Morsels
Perhaps the oddest stocking stuffer for the North Bay foodie on your holiday list is Cookies for Rookies, a little hand-drawn map that outlines the top cookie-purchasing and -baking spots in Sonoma County. Created by the tireless cookie passion of compadres Maayan Simon and André Morand, Cookies for Rookies: A Guide to Sonoma County’s Cookie Scene is surprising in a number of ways. First, and most obviously of course, is the notion of there being a “cookie scene” at all. Graciously allowing that as a granted, we next widen in prudish wonder at the intensely sexual nature of said cookie scene, in which there are evidently cookies to “satisfy every desire,” as Simon and Morand report of the Artisan Bakers in Sonoma. “Are you getting hot?” they ask, “Because we sure are.” Man, pass those cookies! A benefit for Free Mind Media, Cookies for Rookies is an intensely personal, sweet little guide that fits snugly into a wallet, perfect for taking out into the scene when going cookie-hopping. To learn how to support independent media while satisfying every desire, go to www.myspace.com/cookiesforrookies.
Also on the do-gooding-while-eating trail, we direct your attention to the Marin French Cheese Factory, long known for its award-winning Rouge et Noir soft cheeses. The oldest hand-made artisanal cheese producer in the U.S., Marin French Cheese Co. may now also be one of the most altruistic. Owner Jim Boyce was inspired to begin a donation program to the Marine Mammal Center on the Marin Headlands ater reading 2004 news reports about Chippy, the sea lion discovered some 60 miles from the ocean with a bullet cruelly lodged in his head. Nursed back to health at the MMC, Chippy presumably swims free today, but other sea mammals need attention. To help out the good folks at Marine Mammal, Boyce pledges that an entire dollar–and we’re not being facetious, that’s a large percentage on an $8 product–of the price of each of his cheeses sold through area retail outlets will be donated to benefit the center. This holiday season, make it red and black for Chippy and the pups. www.marinfrenchceheese.com.
Quick dining snapshots by Bohemian staffers.
Winery news and reviews.
Food-related comings and goings, openings and closings, and other essays for those who love the kitchen and what it produces.
Recipes for food that you can actually make.
Power Shopping
Made in the North Bay:
I have a confession: I just bought my new Nikon at RitzCamera.com. What’s the big deal? Simply that buying online from a national chain goes against everything I believe.
I avoid Wal-Mart like the scourge that it is and shun mega-malls. Instead, I buy my books at Copperfield’s Books in Sebastopol or at Book Passage in Corte Madera. (Copperfield’s has other outlets in Santa Rosa, Petaluma, Napa and Calistoga.) I wanted to buy my camera at an independent store, but none had the camera-and-lens combo I sought. So I purchased it from a faceless online vendor and ended up saving about $100 because I didn’t have to pay sales tax. This savings didn’t make me feel any better, but I’m sure it induces lots of people to buy online, making it even harder for local merchants to survive.
For me, buying locally isn’t a vague altruistic notion about doing the right thing. It’s damn personal, even selfish. I want independent stores to endure. Locally owned merchants are the true pillars of the community. And when they’re driven out of business by predatory chain stores, we all lose.
A battle is being waged right now in Corte Madera, where a mammoth Barnes & Noble opened last month down the street from Book Passage. That independent bookstore, owned by Elaine and Bill Petrocelli, has a 30-year history of bringing top authors to Marin County, sponsoring events like last year’s benefit with Amy Tan for Hurricane Katrina victims, and raising some $60,000 a year for the local hospice chapter through the sale of donated used books.
Beyond all that, what Book Passage gives back is this: The bookstore has become a place where people gather. Book groups meet there, annual conferences bring aspiring and legendary writers together (and add to the coffers of nearby hotels, restaurants and bars), and book lovers converse in the store’s cafe.
On a sun-splashed August day, there are few places I’d rather be than on Book Passage’s piazza, chatting over a chai tea and gazing at the perfect pinnacle of Mt. Tam. In so many ways, Book Passage and other independent stores have become the piazzas of America. We sorely lack what’s found in most every European and Latin America town: the central plaza, the zocalo, the village green. Vibrant bookstores with cafes help to fill this void.
A four-day travel-writing seminar at Book Passage in 1992 fueled my desire to become a travel writer. A decade later, I garnered a contract for my first literary book, A Sense of Place, from a publishing house called Travelers’ Tales, whose executive editor I met at that seminar.
Whether buying books, bicycles, crafts, hardware or produce, there are so many reasons to support local shops. Much more of your dollar stays in the community (as opposed to getting siphoned off to some distant corporate headquarters), and local merchants often support nearby producers, cutting down on the environmental costs of shipping. Independent stores don’t create the sprawl of malls. Since 1990, the amount of retail space per American has doubled, from 19 square feet to 38 square feet, according to Stacy Mitchell, author of Big-Box Swindle. Great Britain has just seven square feet per person.
“I believe we are as political as where we put our money,” says Candra Rainey, owner of Milk & Honey, a gift and jewelry store in Sebastopol. “We can take back our power with our everyday choices. It is political to buy from a local, small business.~It is political to buy from a woman-owned store. It is political to support local artists.”
Many of us are glad to send $40 to NPR or $50 to Greenpeace. Yet we sometimes drive to clusters of soulless boxes or succumb to the ease of buying online without realizing what’s being lost. In the last 15 years, about half the independent bookstores in the U.S. have shut down. Similar trends have hit pharmacies, stationery shops and other local businesses. With the holidays approaching, let’s support local stores and keep our community centers alive. We’ll all be better for it in the long run.
So what will I do with the $100 I saved on my camera? I’m using it to renew my membership in Left Coast Writers, a monthly salon at Book Passage where writers meet with top authors and editors, the kind of gathering that will never happen down the street at Barnes & Noble.
Info on Stacy Mitchell’s book, ‘Big-Box Swindle,’ is at www.bigboxswindle.com. For Mitchell’s report about the costs of megastores, go to www.bohemian.com and download the pdf. For an alliance of local Petaluma businesses, see www.ibuypetaluma.org.
News Briefs
Mitchell resurfaces
An online blog is the latest forum for Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Mitchell, former owner of the Point Reyes Light newspaper. Last fall Mitchell sold the Light to Robert Plotkin for $500,000, but the two had a falling out. Mitchell is under a three-year injunction to stay away from Plotkin and the Light offices, and recently a judge ordered him to stop writing on a volunteer basis for the Bodega Bay Navigator, an online-only publication. Now Mitchell has launched SparselySageAndTimely.com. The blog presents Mitchell’s musings on birds, lizards, raccoons, snakes and Plotkin. “This is my one opportunity to publicly make a point-by-point rebuttal to all the things the new owner of the Light has said about me in public,” Mitchell explains.
Honored but humble
California Department of Forestry (CDF) battalion chief Tina G. Anderson of Napa County says she was just doing her job when she helped rescue a helicopter crew in July 2004, actions that recently earned her the Governor’s Medal of Valor. In 2004, a Butte County fire was believed to be under control when a CDF helicopter crashed in a steep, brushy area. While Battalion Chief Joseph W. Waterman led some 50 firefighters in creating a landing zone for a helicopter rescue, Anderson and heavy fire equipment operator Fredrick Westrip worked to extricate a member of the helicopter crew who was trapped inside the downed craft. A spot fire broke out approximately a thousand feet downhill from the crash site and began racing in their direction. “The sequence of events went from really bad to worse,” Anderson recalls. The injured crew was airlifted out and the firefighters retreated. “About the time we made it to the safety line, the fire hit the crash site, so we didn’t have a lot of time left,” Anderson says. Everyone survived. Waterman and Westrip each also received a Medal of Valor from the governor. Anderson says she doesn’t feel like a hero. “There are a lot of people out there who do amazing things, who don’t get recognition.”
Funding nurses
The state recently handed out $1.5 million in a competitive grant process, and Sonoma State University picked up $114,319 for its program offering master’s degree-level nurse-practitioner training for rural and underserved areas of Northern California. The students can either be on SSU’s Rohnert Park campus or participate online through a “distance learning” program in collaboration with the California State Universities at Chico and Stanislaus, explains SSU nursing department chairwoman Liz Close.
Two by Two
Best-of-the-year lists are often about connecting big cultural dots. What did this year’s discs by Beck and E-40 tell us about micropersonal technology? Did the latest by the Killers and DJ Shadow shed any light on religious extremism? This topical thinking led me nowhere in 2006, but I did find that new releases made sense in pairs.
For example, I found two openly political singles both inspiring for their divergent displays of humanism. The Dixie Chicks’ “Not Ready to Make Nice” is a bitter, trenchant reply to the shit they’ve taken for being anti-Bush; it’s dead serious blues-rock with its own stay-the-course truth. Conversely, Soul Asylum’s “Lately” is the best bring-the-boys-home fantasy of 2006, thanks to its light-hearted bubblegum swing.
Here are some pairings that connect a few of the year’s best albums.
Drive-By Truckers, A Blessing and a Curse; Ghostface Killah, Fishscale
This pair shares the great attribute of plain-spoken, thoughtful storytelling. Drive-By Truckers offer gutsy, emotive roots-rock, emerging from the shadow of Lynyrd Skynyrd comparisons not with triple guitar fire but rather with a triple singer-songwriter punch. Ghostface Killah is the last member of rap collective Wu-Tang Clan to remain vital, yet he sounds vulnerable on this character-filled, soul-based narrative about dealing cocaine. Both discs tell cautionary tales about moving on; while DBT ask what’s next on the Stones-like “Aftermath USA,” Ghostface samples the Stylistics for a sad goodbye on “Big Girl.”
Boris, Pink; Bobby Bare Jr., The Longest Meow
If you enjoy an off-the-cuff, warts-and-all aesthetic, this pair packs a huge payoff. Boris are a Japanese noise-punk power trio that smoke ambient feedback and belch industrial spazz, sometimes in terse riff-metal blasts and sometimes in scattered transformations like the 17-minute drone “Just Abandoned Myself.” Bobby Bare Jr.’s dad was a modest ’70s pop-country star, but Junior’s ahead of the sons-of-country-outlaws curve that includes Shooter Jennings and Hank III. His disc isn’t even country (he’s backed by jam band heroes My Morning Jacket) but rather the kind of ragged, melodic alt-rock meltdown we used to get from the Replacements.
Tom Russell, Love & Fear; Todd Snider, The Devil You Know
In this tandem of world-weary songwriters, Russell is wiser than Snider, but Snider is funnier than Russell. Or is it the other way around? Aren’t Russell’s endless romantic images of church and the heart more amusing than empathetic? Isn’t Snider so much deeper than his smart-ass clowning character? The photos of ex-girlfriends that Russell converses with on “The Pugilist at 59” talk with a humor that Snider has no use for when he squarely confronts his boss on “Looking for a Job.”
Pearl Jam, Pearl Jam; Outkast, Idlewild
Veterans figured big in 2006, but this pair reached the summit via different paths. Pearl Jam returned from alt-icon mediocrity with a direct, biting and basic hard rock sound. Outkast’s movie soundtrack, a diverse but complete stew of a hundred years of American pop, continued stretching the hip-hop duo’s creativity. Both offered plenty of drama; the characters in Idlewild no doubt understand Eddie Vedder’s plea, “Having tasted a life wasted / I am never going back again.”
Alejandro Escovedo, The Boxing Mirror; the Raconteurs, Broken Boy Soldiers
Here are two discs about transformation. Roots-rock veteran Escovedo recently recovered from life-threatening hepatitis C, and The Boxing Mirror pulses with stark, sweet, subtle ballads about staring death in the eye. White Stripes’ Jack White rethinks himself as simply one of two frontmen in the Raconteurs, a hooky neo-classic rock band that also rebirths pop songsmith Brendan Benson.
Mastodon, Blood Mountain; TV on the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain
Yeah, I just combined these two for laughs. But is this pair the uncharted future of rock? Mastodon’s hypertechnical prog-thrash hybrid is the new nu metal, and TV on the Radio’s weird indie dance rock may be the new neo-new wave.
Whether that’s meaningful or empty ear candy, these connections are a cultural mountain I look forward to climbing again next year.
Lit Wit
Made in the North Bay:
If, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, what’s it worth when the picture is that of two guys known around the world for the words they don’t use? The math gets tricky when solving fractions of words. That said, an eloquently simple photograph graces the back flap of Sonoma writer-actor Reed Martin and his cohort Austin Tichenor’s new book, Reduced Shakespeare: The Attention-Impaired Reader’s Guide to the World’s Best Playwright [Abridged] (Hyperion; $17.95).
There is Tichenor, professorially adorned in a blue sweater, arms crossed and wearing an expression of dedicated seriousness. Standing just behind him, dressed in a somber suit, is Martin wearing a similarly serious expression largely obscured by the plume of inflated pink bubblegum ballooning from his face. It’s as eloquent an image as the Shakespare-in-a-Groucho-mustache logo used by Martin and Tichenor’s Reduced Shakespeare Company, the lit-wit troupe who have taken the theatrical axe to such hallowed institutions as Shakespeare’s canon, the Bible, American and world history, the great books of literature and Hollywood’s favorite flicks.
Reduced Shakespeare Company shows have toured the world, and the Shakespeare show was turned into a BBC radio mini-series that is still rebroadcast now and then almost 15 years later. While the scripts of those stage shows, or most of them, have been published, Reduced Shakespeare, the book, represents the first time the Reduced Duo have shared the stuff that didn’t make it into those projects–and a whole lot more.
Crammed with offbeat illustrations, charts, diagrams, lists and quizzes, the book is made-to-order as a gift for anyone who loves Shakespeare, hates Shakespeare, likes the Reduced Shakespeare Co. or just enjoys irreverent fun-poking aimed at lofty subjects. It represents an impressive step toward the mainstream for Martin and Tichenor, who’ve been weaseling their way into the consciousness of literate humors through regular appearances on NPR’s All Things Considered, where they’ve offered reduced and semiflatulent versions of everything from A Christmas Carol to King Lear. Now that Monty-Python-in-a-library sense of humor is translated into what works simultaneously as a humorous book about Shakespeare and his plays and an entertaining spoof of books about Shakespeare and his plays.
As the authors write in the book’s preface, “Somebody, somewhere needs to boil down all the pertinent information [about Shakespeare], into one brilliantly concise, intellectually cogent and entertainingly readable volume.
“Until somebody does that,” they add, “we’ve written this.”
Much of the book is inspired nonsense, as with the Bard’s “previously undiscovered” to-do list, which tells us that Shakespeare was planning to write a tribute to Queen Elizabeth tentatively titled The Regina Monologues, and includes a reminder to “Take out garbage (including Timon of Athens).”
Succinctly and clearly explaining the difference between a folio and a quarto by offering a visual image of folded paper, the two also offer a funny but genuinely useful guide to distinguishing the comedies from the tragedies from the histories. Simply use what they term the “Couples, Corpses and Crowns” rule: in Shakespeare’s comedies, “everyone gets married;” in the tragedies, “everybody dies;” and in the histories, “somebody’s named King.”
For many, the hot creamy center of the book will be the explorations of the plays, each of which includes a bare-bones plot description with a one-sentence encapsulation that places the plot in a modern context and then suggests a moral for the story. For example, in writing about Macbeth, Martin and Tichenor give us the following:
“Plot: Macbeth, encouraged by three witches and his power-hungry wife, wants to be King of Scotland. He kills Duncan and becomes King himself. Lady Macbeth goes mad and dies. Macbeth is then killed by Macduff.
“One Sentence Plot Encapsulation: Lady Macbeth encourages her husband to be more aggressive in pursuing career options.
“Moral: What goes around comes around.”
Sure to be a permanent resident on the shelves of Shakespeare festival bookstores all over the country, this very funny, smart and delightfully dumb book even includes reviews of every movie made from a Shakespeare play, a stunt that leads to one of its best academic groaners, describing Anthony Hopkins’ performance in the bloody film Titus as “silence of the Iambs.”
If you know anyone who’d understand that joke, then this book is definitely for them.
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