The Sixth Annual Indy Awards

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The Sixth Annual Indy Awards

Photograph by Michael Amsler

The boys of Pandacide bring us music worth listening to.

The Sixth Annual Indy Awards

Showcases organizations new and old

By Davina Baum, Sara Bir, Gretchen Giles, and David Templeton

Each year there’s a moment of panic when we look back on the previous years of Indy Award honorees and wonder who, exactly, we’ll pick this year. like i said, it’s just a moment. then reality sets in. There are literally hundreds of worthy recipients, and we have to pick just five.

This year, we’re pleased at the variety the recipients represent, each doing their part to make the North Bay rich in arts. And remember: Next year there will be more.

Join us to fete the Indy honorees and celebrate the arts in the North Bay! The North Bay Theater Group will perform pieces honoring each of the recipients. There will also be ample amounts of accordion playing, opera singing, good snackin’, and general rabble-rousing. It’s free and open to all. Come to the Sonoma County Museum, Seventh and B streets, on Wednesday, Oct. 1, from 5:30pm to 7:30pm. (DB)

Josh Drake and Chris Ryder, Pandacide Records

Ask the guys of Pandacide what it’s like to run a record label and Chris Ryder–half of the team behind Pandacide–will say, “Ask him,” pointing to Josh Drake, Pandacide’s other half. Rumor has it that Josh does all of the work, while Chris manages to book all of the bands with girls.

Whatever the division of labor, Pandacide Records has grown from a vague idea in 2001 to a real-life label with eight releases and counting under its belt. And while there are a handful of scrawny yet noble record labels in the North Bay, Pandacide is probably the most ambitious in scope, releasing material by bands from all over the West Coast–or world, if you count Henry Fiat’s Open Sore, a Scandinavian punk band.

And it’s all right out of Petaluma, where Chris and Josh live in the Pandacide House and are employed at a lively health products distribution company–which is where the name Pandacide originated. “The name came first, from a tradition we have here where you go and write something on the white board, the most random thing you can,” Chris says. “We were talking about how nice guys finish last, and I made the comment how we were both panda bears, and so then it was just ‘girls commit pandacide.'” Uh, yeah.

So they had a name; all they needed was a mission, a way to contribute to the constantly evolving North Bay indie music scene. “It was going to be a zine, but we ended up getting the idea that it would be a promotion company and a booking agency,” says Josh, who wound up performing both duties anyway once the label was launched.

For three months, they sold buttons and T-shirts, but no records. Then Pandacide began booking shows, which is how the label picked up Asteroid Band by Sin in Space, a Pixies-esque band from Santa Cruz who played at Pandacide’s first show. Pandacide needed bands, Sin in Space needed a label. Voilà.

Pandacide’s next release, a lovely 7-inch picture disc by the Velvet Teen, taught the forces behind Pandacide that, while indeed lovely, picture discs are very expensive to produce.

Pandacide has acquired a lot of its learning though such decisions–decisions that are initially cool but ultimately make no sense, businesswise. Consider, for example, the extra cost of producing an over-card to cover up the potentially offensive cover art for the Peppermints’ Sweet Tooth Abortion. Or that Sin in Space (who have a long-delayed split 7-inch with the Velvet Teen coming out soon) sadly went on to implode from an overdose of rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle.

So they live and learn, and put out some true underground gems in the process, stuff that warrants regular rotation in the CD player. Pandacide’s catalogue includes power pop (the Librarians), arty noise stuff (Archaeopteryx, Get Get Go), gnarly grrrl shack rock (the Peppermints), Mexican-American punk (Los Dryheavers), and video-game electronic music (Little Cat). There’s not really a Pandacide sound or a definitive type of Pandacide band. “It does mirror our CD collections in some ways,” says Josh, “because who listens to just one genre of music?”

At the core of Pandacide, it may be just Josh and Chris, but there’s a whole network of other folks who’ve been sucked in to help out. “It takes the help of everyone you know,” Josh says. “You need people to master, to record the songs, to do the artwork. You do end up enlisting the help of other friends–and labels.”

Also a tremendous assistance, locals Sara Sanger and Josh Staples have shared insight gained from running their own label, Flying Harold Records. “Like not do it at all,” says Chris.

True, running an indie record label out of your home, garage, or on the sly at work is not what most people consider fantastic fun. It’s a lot of effort for virtually no money, a labor of love. “We can only do two releases a year,” Chris says. (Note: This year they have six.)

“We learned the lesson,” Josh says. “I swear we learned the lesson.” (SB)

Photograph by Rory McNamara

Michael Schwager brings us art from around the world and right close to home.

Michael Schwager, Sonoma State University Art Gallery

Finding a moment to catch Michael Schwager at rest is like trying to find a moment when an infant isn’t growing. The Sonoma State University art professor chairs his department, is the director of the prestigious University Art Gallery, and teaches art history and museum studies three days a week. He sits on the boards of both the Di Rosa Preserve and the Charles M. Schulz Museum, and was until recently on the board of the Sonoma County Museum.

Additionally, Schwager mounts five gallery shows a year, writes accompanying catalogues when he can squeeze in the time, directs the annual Art from the Heart fundraising bash, and is currently amid the daunting slate of special events that will comprise his gallery’s year-long 25th anniversary celebration.

Arriving at a Cotati cafe after class, at least one part of this energetic professor needs a break–Schwager’s voice simply gives out. But before the croaking begins, he is able to generously limn a career that began when he volunteered at the La Jolla Museum as an intern. Having gotten a degree in art from the California College of Arts and Crafts, he never really became the painter he thought he might be.

But working behind the scenes at La Jolla, he says, made him realize that there was an entirely fascinating level to the arts–not getting the paint to the canvas, but rather the canvas to the wall–that he had never before imagined. “I just thought, ‘Wow, what a cool world,'” he smiles. “It was suddenly my right place to be.”

From San Diego, he came to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where Rene di Rosa sat on his board (“We’ve come full circle,” Schwager says), acting as the exhibition coordinator there for five years. Schwager spent the next two years at the innovative Richmond Art Center and, feeling restless, casually answered a help wanted ad in a magazine. In early 1991, much to his own modest surprise, he got that job, as the director of SSU’s University Art Gallery.

Within the year, the school had added a course load to the job description. “I panicked, of course,” he chuckles, “because I’d never taught before.” Figuring that keeping organized enough to stay ahead of his pupils was the key, Schwager quickly got comfortable in the classroom. “I love the conversation about art,” he says now. “Teaching is one of those great times when there are no phones, and there is this wonderful convergence with the students of what they want to say to me and what I want to say to them.”

Schwager is widely credited with creating an outstanding atmosphere for aspiring museum staffers, producing roughly 90 percent of his gallery exhibitions through collaboration with his students, many of whom have gone on to work with major institutions throughout the United States.

Gay Dawson, executive director of the Sonoma Museum of Visual Art, says, “Michael teaches an arts administration class that has basically produced a large percentage of the arts administrators and support staff in the region; most of the people I hire come from him. He really cares about artists and he really cares about art.” Later she reflects, “He’s the type of person you want to work with. He’s kind and devoted to the arts, and he’s generous.”

Over the past 12 years as gallery director, Schwager has showcased emerging German artists, even coaxing them all to travel to Sonoma County, and has repeatedly made certain that residents of the North Bay have access to free exhibitions of work by such art stars as Jean-Michel Basquiat, George Baselitz, Enrique Chagoya, Ed Kienholz, Willem de Kooning, and Kiki Smith, to name just a small handful. Because while the gallery is certainly for the students and faculty of SSU, it is just as certainly for the rest of us too.

“I’m not interested in making us the most wonderful institution in the North Bay,” he says. “We’re part of a group of wonderful institutions. But we’re not just for the students, though they’re our primary focus. We’re here for the community.” (GG)

Photograph by Judy Hardin Cheung

The Wow! Art Salons encourage eclectic conversations about art.

Wow! Art Salons

Seven years ago, a Novato-based art aficionado named Angar Mora stepped reluctantly into the limelight to conduct a quirky little artistic experiment. Seeking a way to “woo the imagination” (those are his words), Mora, originally from Denmark, launched a miniature cultural revolution modestly dubbed the Wow! Art Salons.

Wow is right.

Mora’s innovative art-themed mixers–commonly referred to as “the Monday night salons”–have since gone on to become a certified North Bay institution, a vast, artistic collaboration that has involved countless artists and performers from across the Bay Area and beyond. Boasting provocative weekly themes (“Gravity of Reality, Lightness of Imagination,” “Wind, Ocean and Sailing Machines”) and drawing a cross-pollinating array of art makers and creative thinkers, the Wow! Art Salons are a unique and valuable oasis in the wild and wooly North Bay art landscape.

So then, what’s an art salon?

Imagine an elegant, reasonably priced dinner among friends and new acquaintances, all of whom share a love of painting, sculpture, photography, music, and fine conversation. Imagine that the room is crammed with interesting original art and that the artist responsible for those pieces is sitting right across the table from you, asking you to pass the bread before launching a spirited discussion about cultural elitism or freedom of speech or the appropriate use of deep focus. Toss in a lively Q&A session with said artist, a quick art auction, a short “art swap” period, then wrap the whole thing up with a bit of delightful jazz by an up-and-coming quartet.

That, in a nutshell (probably a hand-painted one) is the Monday night salon. Held regularly in a backroom at Cafe Arrivederci in San Rafael, the salons have become a dynamic demonstration of how food, art, music, and storytelling can be thrown together in ways that stimulate discussion, build support for the arts, and encourage collaboration. Collaboration, it turns out, is the vital element on which the salons have been thriving.

“The art salons are not about individuals,” explains Mora. “This project is about group effort, it’s about collaboration and cooperation, which I think are inherent in the art process. When you think about it, there’s not just a painter in the process. There’s a viewer too, to make the painting complete. I see the art evenings the same way.”

Mora, who acts as the moderator and host for the Monday evening salons, is not an artist himself. He’s more like a cheerleader, expertly whipping up enthusiasm while shifting focus away from himself and onto the people who do the hard work of making amazing art. “I see myself as a catalyst, not as a doer,” Mora says.

While the salons are plenty of fun–and popular enough that reservations are required (call Mora at 415.897.7313)–there is a more serious, and more ambitious aspect to the whole Wow! experience: that is, Mora’s successful efforts over the years to distribute and display new art in Bay Area restaurants.

“We have about 15 concurrent exhibits going on at any given time,” Mora says, adding that Wow! puts up about 250 exhibits a year. Let’s do some math. If you take the restaurant exhibits, held in various restaurants including Cafe Arrivederci, and you add the Monday evening art salons, which involve approximately 100 visual artists a year, then you can conclude that over a thousand artists have been brought to public attention over the last seven years. The restaurant exhibits are a deliberate attempt to bring the work of important living artists into contact with the people who are in the market for some art but didn’t know it until they went out to dinner.

“I don’t think a lot of people go to galleries,” says Mora. “I think collectors go there. As a standalone retail situation, the gallery is not a very viable option. It’s like church. If people aren’t coming to the church, you have to take the message out to where the people are. And we’ve found that, for the most part, the people are in the bars and restaurants.”

Art and music, Mora likes to say, are “gifts for our imagination–“imagination” being the key word. A piece of art, whether its a song or painting, is an expression of the artist’s imagination. But it is also an opportunity to fire up the enthusiasm and imagination of the viewer and the listener. So a partnership is formed when both the artist and the audience have a creative experience.” (DT)

Photograph by Michael Amsler

Michael Savage, as executive director of the Napa Valley Opera House, has led Napa’s beautiful new arts venue to completion.

Napa Valley Opera House

The fanfare surrounding the opening of the Napa Valley Opera House’s main stage this past August was all-consuming, extensive, and entirely deserved.

On Aug. 1, 2003, the Margrit Biever Mondavi Theatre stage brazenly pulled up her curtain for the public, revealing her wares. Stepping onto the meticulously reproduced stage was doyenne of screen and stage Rita Moreno.

After decades of work by tireless, dedicated fundraisers, Napa has a new arts venue, and the incredible theater is injecting the oft-maligned city with a fresh vibrancy. Just 30 years earlier, the building had been slated for demolition, a shopping center proposed for the location. In fact, demolition was threatened a number of times in the long path to restoration.

In 1973 the building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Even then, progress was painfully slow, despite the fundraising work of volunteers Veronica Di Rosa, Tom Thornley, and John Whitridge, among many others, who were determined to restore the theater to its previous glory. In 1985 a nonprofit was formed to raise money; in 1997 the facade was restored. Just last year the downstairs Cafe Theatre was opened, an intimate stage that offered just a taste of what was to come.

This second act, as it were, comes 123 years after the first opening, in 1880. The original theater was built by George “G. W.” Crowey, its Italianate facade designed by the Newsome brothers and local architect Ira Gilchrist. It cost $30,000 to build, and because Crowey didn’t believe that he would make enough money, he installed three retail stores on the building’s first floor.

A lot of things are different this time around, including the $14 million price tag, but a lot is the same. Executive director of the Opera House Michael Savage notes that “the theme throughout [has been] to try to do as much as we can that’s original.” So the atmosphere of the theater is old-world, with its swooping curves and warm colors. The upper balcony is the original wood, left unfinished so as to showcase its age. Meanwhile, the backstage machinations are entirely modern. The sound system is state-of-the-art, and the orchestra pit is modular to allow for different configurations depending on the needs of the production.

The productions, too, have some similarities. The first show to take the stage in 1880 was Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore, traveling to Napa just two years after its world premiere in London. This year, Opera à la Carte’s production of the now-classic operetta once again rollicks on stage. And while performers like Luisa Tetrazzini, John Philip Sousa’s band, and Jack London aren’t around now to entertain, the Opera House has managed to schedule a diverse array of talent, including performances by the Vienna Choir Boys, Taylor 2 dance company, and Wynton Marsalis.

Savage says that the model for the current slate of performances is series like Cal Performances in Berkeley, which covers a range of genres. “The aim is to bring in really top-quality shows, people like Dianne Reeves.” (Reeves inaugurated the intimate downstairs Cafe Theatre, which will now serve as a piano bar and reception area.)

The original Opera House had high ambitions, too, but circumstances led to the theater’s closing in 1914. Vaudeville theater didn’t have the draw for audiences newly smitten with the magic of the movies, and the theater had been damaged in the 1906 earthquake. Now, however, there is a palpable need for arts venues and an audience to fill them. (DB)

Photograph by Rory McNamara

Doug Bowes (foreground) and the Occidental Community Choir’s focus on original work has made them a local gem.

Doug Bowes and the Occidental Community Choir

I can’t say we’re the only choir around that does all-original music,” says Doug Bowes, director of the boundary-busting, aurally outstanding Occidental Community Choir, “but we are the only one I know about.”

Founded in the winter of 1978 when a group of folks met in downtown Occidental to sing Christmas carols–and decided then and there to never stop–the OCC, which Bowes “inherited” in 1988 from longtime director Allaudin Mathieu, is indeed one of the very few community-based choirs devoted to the composing and performance of new works. Almost all of these are written by members of the 40-person choir. Compared to most choral ensembles, the majority of which draw from the vast, rich tradition of classical choral music, the OCC’s embrace of original material marks a radical departure.

“We’re part of that classical tradition, somewhat,” allows Bowes, “but we also draw from the traditions of the theater–not that we do theater, per se, but like a theater company, every season we work to create a brand new show, pretty much from scratch. We do original choral pieces, though some are based on classical texts and oriental poetry, etc. We experiment a lot. We’re definitely different.”

To get a sense of just how different, check out the group’s website (www.strattonslater.com/choir) and take a gander at the official OCC group photo, in which the choir is bedecked in a Halloween party’s worth of weird getups, with the head of Doug Bowes apparently in the clutches of a baton-waving gorilla. As for the material the group performs each spring and winter, says Bowes, “Some is brand-new, composed specifically for that concert, and some is older material that was composed by choir members in the past, used in shows from a few years ago and rotated back into the lineup.”

Bowes, 55, a classically trained musician and composer born in Toronto, is himself responsible for a good number of the pieces the choir performs, having added (at last count) about 115 pieces written in a variety of styles. While much of the OCC’s “all-original” thrust is spurred by Bowes’ own devotion to the crafting and proliferation of new musical works, the OCC’s orientation away from the classics began, in part, with Bowes’ predecessor, composer-author Allaudin Mathieu, whom Bowes counts among his great musical heroes.

“Allaudin always wanted to do concerts that were about the place we live, about Sonoma County,” says Bowes, explaining that original material had already begun to be performed by the choir, but it was always blended in with more traditional choral pieces. “The last year that Allaudin was the director,” says Bowes, “his dream of doing a show about Sonoma County actually happened. It was called ‘Music from Home,’ and it was the first concert the OCC did that was all original material.”

Bowes took over the choir the following year when Mathieu stepped away to concentrate on other projects. He quickly suggested that the group continue the focus on all-original music, and aside from one or two Christmas carols during the holidays (hey, that’s how the whole thing started, right?), the OCC has devoted itself to the original-music cause. In so doing, the choir has earned a devoted following, music fans with a taste for on-the-edge compositional derring-do. How about an eight-minute, Mozart-inspired opera based on the story of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer? Or a complex choral piece, fusing bits of traditional parent-to-child advice (“Eat your vegetables; go to bed; no, you cannot get a small tattoo”). The OCC has developed and performed those pieces, and hundreds more.

Additionally, in morphing into a choir devoted to original, self-generated material, the OCC has become a kind of movable workshop for what might turn out to be a new generation of composers.

“It helps,” says Bowes, “that we always have a finite goal–the concerts. And it’s meant that anyone in the group who’s a writer–especially a novice writer–actually gets the opportunity to hear what they wrote, and to evaluate it and see if it worked or not. And yes, sometimes we present a piece that, um, doesn’t quite work.”

It’s not easy coaxing so many singers to take the leap into the composer circle, and it requires a safe, supportive atmosphere, with an emphasis on creative risk-taking.

“It’s a very collaborative process,” Bowes says. “What’s so wonderful is that, over the years, the OCC has seen the emergence of a number of incredibly good composers.” (DT)

From the September 25-October 1, 2003 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

‘And Now Ladies and Gentlemen’

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‘And Now Ladies and Gentlemen’

Song of Myself: Patricia Kaas goes from moody chanteuse to moody actress in Claude Lelouche’s latest.

Letter Men

For Nate Gebhard and Mike Marriner, a gloomy French movie inspires a spirited life-and-death discussion

Writer David Templeton takes interesting people to interesting movies in his ongoing quest for the ultimate postfilm conversation. This is not a review; rather, it’s a freewheeling, tangential discussion of life, alternative ideas, and popular culture.

“How much do you think this place paid out for all this Irish memorabilia?”

“Good question! I look around, and a lot of this stuff looks like you could get it out of an Irish pub catalogue!”

“www.fakeirishpubdecorations.com!”

Nate Gebhard and Mike Marriner are taking turns making loud jokes, shouting to be heard above the rowdy hubbub of a noisy Irish (or pseudo-Irish) pub. We’ve just caught an advance screening of Claude Lelouche’s latest film And Now Ladies and Gentlemen, about an aging English jewel thief (Jeremy Irons) and a depressed French nightclub singer (Patricia Kaas), each of whom experiences mysterious and poorly timed blackouts. They meet up by accident in Morocco and set out on an a gloomy adventure, during which they talk philosophically about life, death, and the embarrassment of forgetting your song lyrics in the middle of a performance.

Gebhard and Marriner have been on a few adventures of their own lately, traveling the country in a big, green RV, interviewing successful and colorful people–Supreme Court justices, symphony conductors, coffee-company CEOs–about each subject’s dream career and how they achieved it. The result is a PBS documentary, a popular website (www.roadtripnation.com), and a new book, Road Trip Nation: A Guide to Discovering Your Path in Life.

While embarked on yet another tour, this time to promote the book and to score a few more interviews for future projects, Gebhard and Marriner, both young enough to get carded when they walk into an Irish pub, eagerly agreed to take a break from all that self-promotion and go to the movies. They enjoyed the film, in spite of its twisted plotting, and Marriner especially enjoyed the performance of Patricia Kaas.

“She was so hot!” he says, as the pints of Guinness arrive.

“There were a lot of themes in this movie,” I shout out, “stuff about journeys and finding happiness, which are also the themes of your book. But instead of getting into all that, I want to pose the question that was asked in the movie: ‘If you had an envelope, and inside it was the date and time of your death, would you open the envelope?'”

They sit silently for a few seconds.

“I don’t know,” replies Gebhard. “On the one hand, by opening the letter, since you’d know the date you’re going to die, you can lead your life a little more by-the-day and by-the-minute, making the most of it. You can plan everything accordingly. But I want to say I would not open the letter, because otherwise, your life and the freedom of living would become too structured. I think you might be tempted to work too far backwards and lose the flow of life. I don’t know.”

“I definitely would not open it,” says Marriner. “Here’s why. After a lot of the interviews we’ve done, we found that life is not so much about the destination, as it is about the journey. By opening up the envelope, you end up focusing so much on the destination that it would take your focus off of the journey. I don’t want to know the destination.

“We were on some radio show today,” Marriner continues, “and the guy asked us, ‘Now that you’ve done all this interesting stuff, what do you want to do with your lives?’ We don’t know what the fuck we want to do, you know? Life isn’t about knowing what you want to do. It’s about taking it day by day, and having the right compass internally about who you want to be and what you want to do.”

“You know,” says Gebhard, “I don’t think opening the letter would help you if you were going to die when you were 80. But if you opened it and discovered that you’re going to die in two weeks, then you’d probably go, ‘OK, I’m going to make the most of these next two weeks.’ I think that’s the only time that letter would do you any good, to keep you from wasting your last few days.”

“Hey, we should be doing that anyway!” Marriner says. “If you are doing that anyway, if you are living your life as if the next two weeks really mattered, if you were living with passion, you wouldn’t need to focus on that destination.”

“You might also choose to skip bad movies,” I point out.

“Yeah,” laughs Gebhard, “but even bad movies can give you something to think about–you know, as you’re lying there dying.”

‘And Now Ladies and Gentlemen’ opens Friday, Sept. 26, at Rialto Cinemas Lakeside, 551 Summerfield Road, Santa Rosa. See Movie Times, p33, for showtimes.

From the September 25-October 1, 2003 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Bistro Allure

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Bistro Allure

Photograph by Michael Amsler

Song of the Siren: Bistro Allure’s chef and co-owner William Azevedo shows off his heirloom tomato salad.

Allure-ing

The unassumingly elegant surprise of Bistro Allure

By Sara Bir

It’s taken a while to get around to reviewing Santa Rosa’s Bistro Allure. It’s always been “the restaurant we’d like to get around to trying out” but never were able, probably because I am forgetful and easily distracted. So Bistro Allure waited patiently, and we kept remembering and then forgetting it.

In the meantime, it moved across town to Fourth Street into what was, for 20-plus years, Cafe des Croissants. Chef-proprietor William Azevedo (brother of Manuel Azevedo, chef of Sonoma’s La Salette) and his wife Allison, who manages front-of-the-house matters, retained the croissant business in the morning and recently expanded their hours to include lunch, so you could eat three meals a day there.

Azevedo cut his teeth working at various locations in Sonoma Valley, including Elaine Bell Catering, the Swiss Hotel, Sonoma Hotel, and La Salette. By moving from its Bennett Valley location (now Govinda’s vegetarian buffet), Bistro Allure lost some tables but gained a charming boutique feel from the diminutive size of the new venue, which has maybe a dozen tables in its creamy-walled dining room. It’s also (except, presumably, for those who live and work in Bennett Valley) a lot more accessible, which is fortunate, because Bistro Allure deserves a visit.

On a Wednesday night, the dining room was impressively close to being full (“full” being a maximum occupancy of 38). The tables are smallish and the quarters are close, but there was a soothing, quiet air to the place, enhanced by the glow of amber lamps illuminating the white tablecloths.

I got a caesar salad ($5.75). After eating at nice restaurants over and over again, you’d figure one would tire of caesar salads. Never! Some very ambitious food writer with a lot of gas money to burn could tour America by sampling the caesar salads at nice restaurants and structure a whole book around it. You could even call it American Caesar: Life and Lettuce at America’s Nice Restaurants.

I’m not going to write that book–but I will gladly be the person who always orders a caesar salad when eating out. Bistro Allure’s was substantial, cool and crisp and in a subtle dressing; shreds of parmesan cheese dotted the top. There’s an option to order it with Spanish anchovies ($1.25 extra), which I found myself wishing I had chosen just for pep.

Amie du Jour and I had a tough time choosing first courses; they all looked tempting, especially the wild boar tostada ($8.75). Amie du Jour settled on the baked salt cod fritters ($8.75), which were the best of both worlds: salty, flaky cod, warm and garlicky, but much lighter than typical bacalhau dishes. A zippy anchovy dressing underscored the whole affair. There was also a large dab of lemon-cilantro aioli in the center of the plate, which was fine, though it was somewhat ignored in favor of the tangy anchovy dressing.

Amie du Jour’s glass of Adler Fels 2000 Fumé Blanc ($6.75) was crisp and aromatic, with appealing citrus notes, but I went nuts over the Toad Hollow 2002 Dry Pinot Noir Rosé ($6). Some hot afternoon when I have a whole day to waste, I’m going to buy a bottle of this light-bodied, easy-drinking stuff and put back the whole thing.

Selecting second courses was also tough: pork tenderloin with a cider reduction and prosciutto and yam croquettes, sea bass crusted with crushed toasted fava beans . . . At the last minute, I switched my decision from the pork tenderloin to the spice-rubbed grouper ($17.75), a splashy dish on a bed of creamy corn and rhubarb succotash topped with a colorful salsa of fruit and nopales. The grouper itself was delicately breaded and nicely crisp, while its flesh was moist. Very satisfying, and perhaps a dish that would be too busy in the hands of a lesser chef.

For reasons that escape me now, when ordering wine to go with the entrée, I forgot that I had ordered the grouper instead of the pork tenderloin, and got the Primavera Vinho Tinto 1999 ($6 glass), thinking it would be lovely with pork. And yes, the soft but rich Vinho Tinto would have been perfect with pork, but not so much the grouper. Doh!

The hanger steak with gorgonzola mashed potatoes ($17.75) suffered from an overly hearty does of gorgonzola, whose pungency managed to elbow out the other flavors going on, particularly the caramelized garlic-mushroom reduction. Even for the two gorgonzola lovers at the table it was distracting. But the steak was cooked a perfect medium-rare, and the potatoes were pleasantly chunky. The wax and green beans on the side were a little undercooked and grassy-tasting. Amie du Jour’s Saintsbury 2001 Pinot Noir ($6.75 glass) was fabulous, jammy and acidic with a slightly prickly finish.

We split the espresso crème brûlée ($5.75)–the trusty caesar salad of desserts. It was definitely big enough to share, and its amber sugar crust was so freshly caramelized that we decided to pause our destruction of it for a moment to allow it to crisp up all the way. No matter. Dessert is not for rushing through, and I’d rather have a too-fresh caramel burnt sugar on my brûlée than a rubbery old one.

Our service was extremely attentive and cordial, but not fawning. Plus our servers were all handsome young men, a nice bonus.

As for those croissants sold in the morning, they seem pretty good. Since croissants are one of the three foods I’m not fond of (the other two being oysters and most pears–it’s a texture thing), I cheated and tried an almond-filled croissant instead of a plain one. Even a nonfan of croissants should be able to detect badly made ones, however, and it’s obvious that Bistro Allure’s rendition of Cafe des Croissants’ recipe is far beyond passable. But you croissant lovers are on your own here.

I can vouch that the cappuccino I had was excellent. It’s interesting to visit Bistro Allure in the morning (some older folks linger at the tables, reading their morning papers and nibbling their croissants as they’ve probably done for years) and compare the fresh slant of the light playing on its walls to the dimmer, more–well, alluring–space it becomes after sunset.

Bistro Allure has a sincerity to it–the food and the atmosphere–that’s very welcoming, making it easier to embrace than other, sleeker fine restaurants in the North Bay. Which is why I’ll recommend it to visitors to Santa Rosa in a heartbeat, and why it’s probable that Bistro Allure won’t stay under the radar for too long.

Bistro Allure. 1226 Fourth St., Santa Rosa. Breakfast daily, 6am-11:30am; lunch, Tuesday-Friday, 11:30am-2pm; dinner, Tuesday-Saturday, 5pm-9pm. 707.569.8222.

From the September 25-October 1, 2003 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Seyed Alavi

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Seyed Alavi

Shadows of Perception: In Seyed Alavi’s installation at the University Art Gallery, words bring light.

Visual Poetry

Iranian artist Seyed Alavi illuminates language at SSU

By Gretchen Giles

This narrow cage,
surely is not meant for a song bird like me.
My home is an enchanted green,
to that garden I shall flee.
–Hafez

From the outside, it appears that the University Art Gallery at Sonoma State University is perhaps undergoing a spate of remodeling. The glass is completely covered with thick, light-defying paper, and the doors, which would normally be open to welcome the Indian summer air, are both firmly closed. But step inside the unlocked entry and the refusal of light and air suddenly makes the eeriest kind of sense.

Inside the entire gallery space, the only illumination comes from the neon twists of cursive-wrought individual words hanging face-down eight to 10 feet from the ground, which itself is completely covered with an inch of fresh, thick, dry dirt and scattered leaves. The electric words, taken from the Hafez poem printed above, may only be parsed by standing directly beneath them staring straight up, and their wild diction only randomly surmised as one wanders from one singular piece of deconstructed text to the next.

In each of the two blackened gallery spaces, whose walls are entirely spun with hand-smeared swirls and long, thin drips of Sumi-e ink, are a few casual scatterings of black tables and chairs. And upon this furniture just as randomly sit nine black wire cages, each housing its own live, brilliantly yellow canary. The sound is spectacular, as the birds trill thrillingly, catching up each other’s songs and then falling swiftly silent upon a visitor’s approach.

But sit quietly on one of the hard chairs in the eerie acoustics of this artificial cave and the birds soon forgive and begin their thin, sweet sound again, singing to each other unseen from room to room with the pleasure of calling a mate who is also trapped, as am I, as are you, as are we all.

Titled “Renunciation: A Requiem,” this installation by Iranian-born conceptual artist Seyed Alavi, showing through Oct. 19, encourages the visitor to consider nothing less than the false security of existence–because, after all, what can we be absolutely certain constitutes true and full freedom? While the birds are clearly caged, a brief glimpse at the gallery’s wire-crossed ceiling reveals no less a prison.

Yet surely the visitor can exit at will, stepping back out into that fresh Indian summer air, and be free. Furthermore, a conscious individual visiting this installation can surely understand with rational thought what is being shown within it, because seeing, surely, is believing. Surely.

Yet what Alavi has also just as surely wrought is a version of Plato’s cave, in which perception isn’t an assured marker of reality, and freedom is just a construct created both collectively and individually with differing boundaries–all of which are, in fact, quite firmly bound.

Speaking by phone from his Oakland home, Alavi kindly explains that he “hate[s] to present that it is like a puzzle, because it’s not at all like a puzzle. My hope is that I’m presenting a poem or a koan. Because I myself am not completely aware. I’m not presenting an answer; I’m presenting a possibility. This is my understanding of the phenomenon that’s represented by the poem. And my understanding is that in the case of the canaries, it’s the matter of the cage. They are there and they’re being fed, so there’s a little level of comfort, but they’re not free.

“And here we are sitting, looking at the shadows. There is a known factor, and we feel OK about it. There might be,” he chuckles dramatically, “a lion out there for all I know! It’s a dark installation, both physically and metaphorically. But I’m inside the cave, too. It’s a sad thing, but inside it’s comfortable. It’s warm and womblike and comforting but nevertheless . . . .” He trails off reflectively.

Alavi, 44, left his home in Iran as a student, immigrating to attend San Jose State University. He received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, where he is now an instructor, and his large conceptual work invariably springs as much from the site where his work will be housed as from wordplay. He avers that he doesn’t know what he’ll do in a particular space until he’s visited it. “It doesn’t dictate the concept and I don’t come with a concept, but it definitely influences what happens,” he says. “I don’t consciously have anything in mind. I go to the space and I begin a dialogue.”

In past installations, Alavi’s dialogue has included carving the rapturous words of a 14th-century mystical poet into a wooden table and overflowing the incised letters with honey. He has placed mirrored poems into a pool, their meaning obscured by random water dropped from the ceiling when a motion detector sensed a visitor; he’s used the language of saints from different faiths to examine their sameness; and he’s lettered the mellifluous Farsi of his homeland onto walls and even Post-It notes to express the broad, shuddering grasp of desire, embrace, and enduring love. Why is language such a huge force in his art?

“It’s a very vast thing for me,” he replies in his excellent English. “One perspective is that I look at language as just another medium such as paint and clay and bronze and glass. From an art-history perspective, artists from the late 19th century or even earlier have used texts in their work. It’s semifamiliar to the audience. From another perspective, I think that language is a very democratic medium of communication, and a slight part of my interest is to make my artwork accessible to the larger public. It’s a very familiar medium [that] bridges the gap between artists and the public. . . . [I like to use] materials that are approachable and familiar–in this instance, dirt and leaves and canaries.

“Another perspective,” Alavi continues, “is my upbringing, in that I was born and raised in Iran and left when I was 17, so a good deal of my childhood and upbringing were influenced by that culture, and in that culture, text is definitely a part of the everyday context. Language is everywhere, from the architecture to the dishes to clothes to vases for flowers–text basically surrounds the culture. And I could also think that being bilingual, I’m very conscious of language and both its power and its limitations for communicating ideas and concepts. I’m fascinated by that.”

Alavi has worked extensively with teenage artists, using the communication tools of graffiti and comic books to help the youths express their own democratic yearnings to make a mark on society, quite literally by adorning East Bay freeway underpasses and creating the thought-balloon cartoons painted on walls in San Francisco streets. And while he is dedicated to making his work as populist as possible, his private aspirations remain concerned with achieving the egoless state of the mystical experience.

“I am hoping that the work can stand for itself and by itself without . . . for example, me introducing mysticism or a particular branch [of spirituality] that might alienate a part of the public,” he explains. “Through utilizing formal constructs, I would prefer it that way. Having said that, my own personal interest is the same as the scientists are concerned with, that the philosophers are concerned with. I haven’t been able to answer the simple questions of my life: who am I and why am I here? That’s what concerns me, and interests me and,” he finishes simply, “I can’t see anything more important than that.”

And with “Renunciation,” Alavi has created an astounding space for such reflection.

‘Renunciation: A Requiem’ continues through Oct. 19 at the University Art Gallery, SSU, 1801 E. Cotati Ave., Rohnert Park. Gallery hours are Tuesday-Friday, 11am-4pm; Saturday-Sunday, noon-4pm. Admission is free. 707.664.2295.

From the September 25-October 1, 2003 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Big Bad Voodoo Daddy

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Big Bad Voodoo Daddy

Swing Style: Big Bad Voodoo Daddy ride the retro train in full regalia.

Hey There, Daddy-O!

Big Bad Voodoo Daddy keep on swingin’

By Greg Cahill

Flannel-clad fans of grunge and alternative rock were more than a little perplexed by the swing-era nostalgia of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy when that band emerged in 1992 with zoot suits, Rat Pack lingo, and a satchel of ’40s and ’50s swing charts. As one of the first bands to ride the wave of retrolounge and neoswing party music, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy got a solid boost in 1996 when Miramax released Swingers, an indie comedy that featured Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn as a couple of likable hipsters on the prowl. The film also featured Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, the only neoswing band in sight, performing two songs in the movie, “You and Me and the Bottle Makes 3 Tonight (Baby)” and “Go Daddy-O.”

Suddenly what had begun as a kitschy underground dance scene moved mainstream, bolstered by the film’s success and crossover hits by the Squirrel Nut Zippers and the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies. Big Bad Voodoo Daddy stepped to the front of the pack, got signed to a major label (their 1999 album This Beautiful Life sold three million copies), and performed for a billion TV viewers, along with Stevie Wonder and Gloria Estefan, as part of the Superbowl XXXIII half-time show.

Before you could say “big-time operator,” the ‘burbs became the burgeoning home to a new generation of swing kids mimicking their grandparents’ dance steps and wearing vintage clothing.

But that fad couldn’t last forever.

Save My Soul, the band’s new CD, finds Big Bad Voodoo Daddy–who perform next week in Petaluma–taking a detour through the funk-drenched sounds of New Orleans. Trumpet and coronet player Glen “the Kid” Marhevka says that transition is only natural, since the band became reinvigorated a couple of years ago after performing at the New Orleans Jazzfest, riding to glory on a Mardi Gras float, and making frequent appearances at the local House of Blues.

“We’ve traveled there a lot over the past decade and have been very inspired by the city and its musicians,” says Marhevka, during a break from rehearsals with the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra (the band has performed a half dozen symphonic shows). “So it just seemed natural to do some new songs that were influenced by what we get out of being in that city.”

The brassy second-line struts and jumpin’ blues found in so much New Orleans R&B translates well for this hard-playing eight-piece swing band. As music critic Hal Horwitz has noted, “Gone are the smarmy Vegas charts, replaced with a swampy Crescent City, slinky Bourbon Street swagger.”

But that doesn’t mean that Big Bad Voodoo Daddy have abandoned their roots. Hardly. “We’ve incorporated about a half dozen of these new songs into our live shows,” Marhevka explains. “It’s certainly not a departure from what we’ve been doing in the past. The swing style still dominates and you can dance to it just the same.”

Still, it’s evident that the band has made a decision to stay loose in the face of the fading fad that first carried them into the spotlight. “We’ve always just done our own thing and moved forward as a band, figuring out the next logical step,” Marhevka concludes. “We were doing what we’re still doing back in ’92 before there was any kind of swing fad, and we’re still doing it. People appreciate that.

“We’re staying true to what Big Bad Voodoo Daddy is, and that commands respect from people. By expanding and showing our influences, we’re showing our core. We’re not trying to calculate our next move. We’re just trying to do what feels right for our band.”

Big Bad Voodoo Daddy perform Monday, Sept. 29, at 8pm, at the Mystic Theater, 21 Petaluma Blvd. N., Petaluma. Lee Press-On and the Nails open the show. Admission is $15. 707.765.2121.

From the September 25-October 1, 2003 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

The RIAA vs. File Sharers

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Hold the Music

The RIAA’s lawsuit against music file sharers hits close to home

By Joy Lanzendorfer

In what is perhaps one of the biggest temper tantrums ever thrown by a trade group over changing market conditions, the Recording Industry Association of America has started suing users over file sharing. Earlier this month, it filed 261 of what will “ultimately be thousands” of lawsuits against people who share their music collection on programs like Kazaa and Grokster.

The RIAA is able to invade people’s personal computers because of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. Through this law, the RIAA can go to anyone’s Internet service provider and subpoena personal user information without a judge’s approval or even the user’s knowledge.

The North Bay has not escaped the RIAA’s scrutiny. Petaluma residents Richard and Julie Warner were notified that they may be sued. Their teens have shared some 1,420 songs, including some music by the Smashing Pumpkins and Mariah Carey, according to the Wall Street Journal. Julie Warner says their lawyer has advised them not to talk to the press. She adds that though she has been informed that her information was subpoenaed, she has not yet seen the subpoenas herself.

The RIAA’s actions have made some nervous. Sonoma State University sent a letter out to students warning them of the consequences of downloading music.

“It is important that the campus community be aware that [the] downloading and uploading of copyrighted music and movies is illegal. Damages can range from $200 to $150,000 per infringement,” the letter reads.

Though SSU is protected from litigation for the most part, it still wants students to be aware of the seriousness of their actions, according to chief information officer Sam Scalise.

“I think that a lot of college students have grown up in an environment where they have been downloading since high school, and it’s never been pointed out to them that it’s wrong,” he says. “Sometimes it’s just a matter of somebody telling them what’s legal and illegal.”

Others have started fighting back. The day after the RIAA filed the 261 suits, Novato resident Eric Parke filed a civil suit in the Marin County Superior Court alleging that the amnesty program the RIAA offers users constitutes fraudulent business practices.

The RIAA’s amnesty program is called Clean Slate. It says that if people sign a notarized affidavit stating they will no longer download music and that they will delete any songs they have already downloaded, the RIAA will wipe the slate clean and not pursue legal action.

But Parke’s suit says the fine print of the agreement does not, in fact, offer any real protection against future legal actions. The RIAA does not destroy data on the user and is free to bring up new lawsuits, according to Ira Rothken, the San Rafael attorney representing Parke.

“Not only does the RIAA keep the data on the people who sign the Clean Slate agreement, they have an admission of guilt from them,” Rothken says.

Parke, who does not download music himself, is seeking an injunction from the RIAA to stop these practices. He is not seeking any money.

“Eric is suing on behalf of the people of California,” says Rothken. “If someone like Eric didn’t do this, maybe no one would. He has the public interest at heart.”

Other efforts against the RIAA have popped up as well. Senator Sam Brownback, R-Kan., introduced legislation to Congress that would require the music companies to file a formal lawsuit to obtain identities of file swappers. Boycott efforts through sites like www.boycott-riaa.com have gained popularity online.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco has had 44,000 people sign a petition to stop the RIAA. The group also maintains an online database at www.eff.org for people to check whether the RIAA has subpoenaed their IP address or user name.

The RIAA, however, feels it’s well within its right to sue people who are stealing its music. But some question how effective it is for the trade group to sue its own customers. And while everyone involved wants to see their favorite artists get paid, others are skeptical about the RIAA’s motives.

“These lawsuits are all about control,” says Jason Schultz of the EFF. “For the last 50 years, the recording industry has controlled how you listen to music and how music is distributed. There’s a whole world here with new technology that takes away that control. That scares the recording industry.”

From the September 25-October 1, 2003 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

‘My Sherlock Holmes’

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‘My Sherlock Holmes’

‘The Infernal Device and Others’ (1978)

‘The Great Game: A Professor Moriarty Novel’ (2001)

‘My Sherlock Holmes: Untold Stories of the Great Detective’ (2003)

Photograph by Michael Amsler

Character Development: ‘My Sherlock Holmes,’ edited by Michael Kurland, fills in various side stories that Arthur Conan Doyle missed.

Shadowing Sherlock

Petaluma writer Michael Kurland and a guy named Holmes

Michael Kurland opens his weathered bag and, magician-like, produces a large stack of books–too large to have come from so compact a container, yet there they are. Setting them on the restaurant table beside a plate of half-consumed unagi, he selects a well-preserved paperback copy of 1964’s Ten Years to Doomsday. While perhaps not a classic of the science-fiction genre, the book is significant in that it is Kurland’s first published novel (co-written with Chester Anderson) and stands as the opening salvo in a long and varied career encompassing more than 40 books as author and editor.

Somewhere along the way, Kurland made a career leap, transforming himself from a writer of science-fiction novels (including The Unicorn Girl, Pluribus, Tomorrow Knight, and The Princes of Earth) to a writer of mysteries and imaginative thrillers, with a specialty in tales about Sherlock Holmes’ arch nemesis, Dr. Moriarty. In doing so, Kurland admits that some of his earliest fans may have been left in the dark.

“People come up to me at the Paperback Book Show in Los Angeles and they’re surprised I’m there,” chuckles Kurland, a gregarious, 50-ish born-and-raised New Yorker with a Richter-scale laugh. “I go to the paperback show pretty regularly to meet my science-fiction fans. People come up with stacks of books for me to sign, and of course there’s always someone who comes up and says, ‘Kurland! Kurland! I thought you were dead!'”

Let it be known: Michael Kurland is not dead. He’s just been living in Petaluma.

Kurland moved here from San Francisco about three years ago, and while it’s not at all like the big, blustering cities he’s been drawn to throughout his life, the author says he likes Petaluma and enjoys poking about downtown, rummaging through the paperback section of used book stores. “It’s kind of a hobby,” he smiles. “I like to look for signed copies of my old books, to see who’s been getting rid of them.”

Such remarks, apparently, are fairly typical of Kurland and are indicative of his distinctive sense of humor. Equal parts curmudgeonly self-confidence and sly, witty self-deprecation, it’s a personal recipe he whips up once again after producing, from that same magical bag, a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle‘s bestseller list from the week of Aug. 3.

At the top of the list is Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code followed by Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Down at No. 9, one notch above Tom Robbins’ Villa Incognito, is My Sherlock Holmes, a collection of short stories featuring different ancillary characters from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic Sherlock Holmes books. According to Kurland, who selected and edited the stories and contributes one of his own, his sudden appearance on a bestseller list came as a bit of a shock.

Kurland says, “My editor called me up right away and said, and I quote, ‘Who did you bribe?’ I replied that it must be some kind of horrible mistake! Of course, I really do think it’s a marvelous book, and the stories contributed by the other authors are magnificent, but I’m always surprised when other people notice those kinds of things.”

Among the writers Kurland persuaded to contribute stories are Richard Lupoff, Cara Black, and Gary Lovisi, devising such stories as “The Incident of the Impecunious Chevalier,” “Cabaret aux Assassins,” and “Mycroft’s Great Game,” respectively. By filling in the shadows of the Holmes stories and giving voice to the legend’s numerous supporting players, Kurland and company have struck pulp-fiction gold.

The book has been so well-received that Kurland has the go-ahead to try a sequel, of sorts. To be titled Sherlock Holmes: Only the Missing Years, the stories will take place during the three years that Holmes was presumed dead, between the great detective’s apparent demise (he fell, presumably to his death, as Conan Doyle attempted to shed himself of his most famous creation) and Holmes’ mysterious resurrection when Conan Doyles’ fans demanded it.

If you add the story collections to his popular Moriarty novels, The Infernal Device and Others (1978), Death by Gaslight (1982), and The Great Game (2001), it would seem that Kurland has stumbled into a niche that desperately needed filling. Then there are all those other books, the mysteries and thrillers that have racked up numerous honors, including a few nominations for the Hugo and American Book awards. It was an award, in fact, that partially sparked Kurland’s decision to stop writing about alien invaders, plagues, endangered galaxies, and underground mutant organizations and to throw his energies into various types of mysteries.

“I was always interested in both science fiction and mystery fiction,” he explains, “and I’d always read both, passionately. As a bit of departure, I wrote The Infernal Device, focusing on Moriarty, and suddenly the book was nominated for an Edgar and an American Book Award. I’d never come particularly close to being nominated for anything as a science-fiction writer, so I figured, ‘Perhaps I’m making a mistake.'”

Lifting his empty cup, he signals to the waitress across the room, making long-distance eye contact as he rapidly recites, “‘Bring me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore; Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed’–I think she saw me, but I’m not sure.”

Sure enough, she’s at our table in 30 seconds, filling Kurland’s cup with tea. Asked to talk about the unceasing popularity of Sherlock Holmes, Kurland pulls My Sherlock Holmes from the stack of books and reads aloud a piece of the introduction.

“‘It has been estimated by the sort of people who estimate these things,'” he reads, “‘that there are over a billion people living today who could tell you, at least in some vague fashion, who Sherlock Holmes was. Many of them don’t realize he is a fictional character or that if he were real he’d be well over a hundred years old now, as is shown by the volume of mail the London Post Office continues to get addressed to 221-B Baker Street.'”

While some writers might have been intimidated by tackling the world of Holmes, Kurland has no qualms about mucking about in the life of literature’s most famous detective.

“It helps that I’m not really dealing with Holmes, except only peripherally, ” he says. “I’m dealing with Moriarty. I’m taking one of Conan Doyle’s secondary characters and I’m making that character do my bidding. I would have been much more leery about tackling an actual Holmes story, describing him solving a crime and all that, with Watson trotting along.”

Of course, Moriarty is commonly thought to be a demented and unrepentant force of pure, seething evil. So how in the world did Kurland decide to turn this guy into a hero?

“My theory about Moriarty is this,” says Kurland. “Moriarty is a crook in the same sense that Robin Hood was a crook–not that he steals from the rich and gives to the poor, but that he flaunts the conventions of his day to live the way he wants to. He commits crimes, but not as an evil genius who goes around killing people. He’s a crook, but a very intelligent one, and the reason that Holmes hates him so much is that Moriarty is the only man that Holmes has ever met who’s smarter than he is, and Holmes can’t stand it. That’s my theory anyway.”

While Kurland’s one writerly contribution to My Sherlock Holmes is a story about Moriarty–a delectable page-turner titled “Years Ago and in a Different Place”–it’s been a quite a few years since Kurland produced an actual Moriarty novel. To feed the impatient fans, Kurland is working hard on a new Moriarty book, one that will take place in Calcutta in the 1890s. He’s enjoying the research required to bring an era to life and has become particularly knowledgeable about fabric and clothing styles of India in the late 1800s.

According to Kurland, it is his constant curiosity about such detailed minutiae that keeps him going after all these years. Every new book is an opportunity to explore a different time and learn about a different place or people. One has to wonder, with Kurland having tackled so many subjects, both fictional and non (he’s somehow found time to produce a separate stack of investigative works), will he ever attempt to tackle a memoir?

“I’ve never been that interested in my own life,” Kurland remarks with another chuckle. “I’d hate to write a memoir and have it be obvious to the readers that I don’t give a damn about the subject.”

From the September 18-24, 2003 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Xtreme Outhouse Race

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Xtreme Outhouse Race

Royal Flush: The Midnight Miss is a fearful contender at the Xtreme Outhouse Race.

Sitting Pretty

Forestville’s Xtreme Outhouse Race is a gas

By Gretchen Giles

If you’ve never heard of an outhouse race, you’ve surely never been to Trenary, Mich., where some 3,000 pun-damaged souls gather each year to cheer on such area heroes as the Privy Pushin’ Poop Pilots or the Coop Crappers. Furthermore, you probably don’t know the young couple who met at the 1995 event, married after the ’96, and had their first child in concordance with the ’97 festivities. Such whirlwind romance is memorialized in their tasteful Wedding Outhouse, replete with sentimental photos of the loving couple at their nuptial potty, er, party.

But Trenary is not the only town so merrily afflicted. Mountain View, Ark., with its rich history of plumbing-deprived backcountry inhabitants, holds a riotous annual outhouse race. Then there’s the Great Outhouse Blowout in Gravel Switch, Ky., which is simply fun to say out loud. And Forestville, our very own outhouse capital supreme, of course assays its second royal flush this Sept. 20.

In fact, 23 towns nationwide hold such an event each year, all of them lousy with outrageous toilet humor and all of them great boosters for the community. Forestville’s, however, may be the only such “Xtreme” event. While this overloaded sports word usually conjures images of brazen athletes flinging themselves up walls or flying gravity-free across bridge spans, “Xtreme” in this instance connotes some eight home-built huts (no professional Port-a-Pottys allowed) being wheeled down a narrow 80-yard gravel track at the Forestville Youth Park.

No, the track’s not treacherously narrow; no, the outhouses don’t have to execute 360-degree aerial spins, land on one wheel, and then flip themselves the other direction; and no, titanium, wax, and anything “phat” are never necessary. So what’s so Xtreme about it? Race chairperson Bruce Witt shrugs with a chuckle, “Well, we couldn’t think of a normal reason to have a race.”

What, perhaps, is normal about the Forestville race is the community-minded fervor behind the event, the Forestville Youth Park having always been a curiously fervent place. Founded innocuously enough in 1960 by a group of parents looking for an adequate spot to hold their annual Cub Scout Carnival, the youth park quickly evolved into a nonprofit corporation that operates a full-service park without the help of the county.

“The Forestville Youth Park keeps our kids off the streets,” says Witt, who shares a fence with the park. “It gives people a place to go to out in nature. And we do this [volunteering] for the kids.”

With a soccer field, a baseball diamond, two sand pit play areas, and a massive 25-foot-long barbecue pit whose smoky goodness largely supports the park through an annual two-day meat-feed each June, the park is home to 20 Little League teams and two soccer leagues, offers rabid boosting to El Molino High School, and on one recent Sunday, provided a perfect place for a rowdy group of ball-playing firefighters to slyly taunt each other between pitches.

But the bathrooms–oy vey! Forty-three years have not been kind to these privies, making them the type of dark concrete pits, dank with unexplainable pools of icky water, which children are rightfully afraid to enter. So, explains Witt, who is by nice coincidence a plumber, what better way to pay for new bathrooms than through the absurdity of an outhouse race?

Of course, there are those who are slyly serious. Raynette James, a retired legal consultant on the Forestville Youth Park’s fundraising committee, is surely one of those. Putting her Raynette’s Dream outhouse, a black hut emblazoned with red flames, into the fray has brought out all of her devilish good humor. She’s suddenly in rough competition with contractor Fred Von Renner, who’s enlisted the high school track team to pull his outhouse. She, in response, is having her custom-made ‘house hauled by the mechanics at the Swiss Watch Garage, while she is seated regally on the pot.

Sponsoring her rod by asking for $10 donations from anyone wishing to have a business card laminated onto its sides, James hopes to raise an astonishing $10,000. “The kids in this community are amazing,” she says. “They may look kind of scary–but then all kids do–but they’re polite and they’re nice. They deserve it. And,” she continues with a grin, “now we’re getting all competitive.”

The Xtreme Outhouse Race powers up on Saturday, Sept. 20, complete with a chili cook-off, a wild hat contest, live music, beer tasting, crafts, and food. Judging at 11am; race at 1pm. Forestville Youth Park, Mirabel Road, Forestville. Admission is free; $10 entrance fee or outhouse sponsorship for racers. 707.887.9841.

From the September 18-24, 2003 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Climate Protection

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Climate Protection

Photograph by Rory McNamara

Weather Woes: Ann Hancock spearheaded the Cities for Climate Protection project with the participation of Sonoma County’s local governments.

Hot in Here

In Sonoma County, what goes up–greenhouse emissions–must now come down

By Joy Lanzendorfer

It’s the end of a strange summer of a strange year, filled with equally strange weather.

The most talked about weather event of the year was the heat wave that burned through Europe, causing forest fires, droughts, and ruined crops. France was the worst hit, with over 11,000 people dying from the heat, many of them elderly. France’s temperature peaked at 104 degrees Fahrenheit, the hottest it has been since 1873. The rest of Europe suffered as well. Switzerland has not seen such a hot June for 250 years, and England and Wales haven’t experienced summer like this since 1976.

The heat wave was not the only unusual weather event this year. In May, the United States saw a record number of tornadoes, peaking at 562 compared to the previous peak of 399 in June 1992. The country also saw much colder weather conditions than normal in the east and southeast. In India, a premonsoon heat wave ranging from 113 F to 120 F killed more than 1,400 people. In Sri Lanka, a cyclone caused major flooding that killed another 300 people.

Often when a natural disaster strikes, people worry what it means. Though everybody knows weather fluctuations are normal and that natural disasters like earthquakes, heat waves, floods, and tornadoes are recorded in some of the earliest accounts of human existence, the increasing frequency of these events concerns scientists.

This year has seen so many odd occurrences that the World Meteorological Organization, a U.N.-appointed climate science agency, released a warning about the weather. The study said that the strange weather events of 2003 might point to an increasing amount of extreme weather in the future. Though no one can say for sure, many believe the odd weather is a result of global warming.

Global warming, of course, is the theory that human activities are releasing too many greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Since these gases cannot leave the atmosphere, they just hang there magnifying the sunlight, leaving us trapped like ants under an ever thickening glass dome.

Global warming has been a mainstream issue for decades. International efforts like the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which aims to curb greenhouse gas emissions from industrialized countries (and which has been stalled due to George Bush’s refusal to ratify it), may come into effect if Russia decides to ratify it. Even in the face of increasing evidence of environmental danger, governments are reluctant to initiate change.

But just when it seems like all hope is lost, a source of inspiration comes from an unlikely place: Sonoma County’s local governments. With the Cities for Climate Protection project, Sonoma County becomes the first in the nation to have 100 percent of its municipalities pledge to quantify and reduce greenhouse gases.

Hot to Trot

The project is part of a larger coalition led by the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, an association of worldwide governments that are pledging to reduce local greenhouse gas emissions. Over 560 governments worldwide are part of the coalition, including 143 in the United States.

“It’s exhilarating to be part of an international campaign,” says Ann Hancock, who spearheaded the local project. “It shows that we are not alone when trying to figure out what to do with this big, huge problem.”

Hancock first heard about the Cities for Climate Protection in 2001 when she worked as a Marin County planner. She went to a conference hosted by the ICLEI and was so inspired, she knew she had to get Sonoma County involved.

The ICLEI provides the municipalities with a five-step model designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Through the five steps, a government inventories greenhouse gas emissions, sets a target of how much it wants to reduce the emissions, makes a plan to reach the target, implements the plan, and monitors improvement and makes adjustments as needed.

Of the local governments, Sonoma County and the city of Santa Rosa implemented the project first, back in 2002. They have completed their inventories of greenhouse gas emissions and are in the process of setting targets and developing plans. Sonoma County has supplied $25,000 to the remaining eight cities to help finance the first phase of the project for them. The cities have also put up $4,000 each.

The other eight cities in the county are nearing the end of the first phase. The results of their inventories will be announced at a meeting of the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors on Sept. 23 at 8:30am. The results will also be published on the project website, www.skymetrics.us.

Consultant for the GHG (greenhouse gas) Inventory Project Ned Orrett developed the methodology for the inventory when he measured the county’s greenhouse gas emissions. Since then, six Sonoma State University interns have taken over doing the inventories for the remaining cities.

For months, the interns have collected data on greenhouse gases emitted by government buildings, streetlights and traffic signals, fleets of public vehicles, government employee commutes, water and wastewater, and solid waste. Sources of the data varied. Information on employee commutes, for example, was gathered from employee surveys, while data on streetlights and traffic signals were obtained from PG&E.

“It’s a rather tedious process,” says Hancock. “It’s a little bit like doing your tax returns the first time.”

However, as tedious as the inventory may be, the real work, according to Orrett, starts in steps two and three, when governments set targets and plan how to reduce emissions.

“When we did our inventory, we found that, lo and behold, these things were emitting greenhouse gases,” Orrett says. “Now the major part of the work is to look at what the governments is already doing to reduce emissions and how to reduce them further.”

Boiling Point

The greenhouse effect is a naturally occurring phenomenon. All living things give off greenhouse gases, which keep the earth’s temperature at around 60 F. Without the greenhouse effect, the temperature of the planet would be around 14 F and uninhabitable.

The problems occur when increasing population and technological advances release more of these greenhouse gases into the air than are supposed to be there. The two greenhouse gases scientists are the most concerned about are carbon dioxide and methane. Carbon dioxide is released whenever fossil fuels like oil, gasoline, or diesel fuel are burned to heat buildings, produce electricity, or power vehicles. As we use more energy, more carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere.

Methane is the second most significant greenhouse gas. It’s a result of organic waste and is often worse in crowded urban areas. Methane becomes a problem when organic waste like paper, yard trimmings, and food decompose in landfills. Sewage treatment plants also give off a large amount of methane. Though there is less methane in the atmosphere, it is 21 times more powerful per unit than carbon dioxide, according to the Climate Protection Campaign.

Scientists and climate-control advocates say that the average earth surface temperature has risen 1 F in the last 100 years, which correlates with the increase in carbon dioxide concentrations that started 150 years ago during the Industrial Revolution. Though that seems just a small amount, any fluctuation in the earth’s temperature can have serious effects on the life around it.

“Small changes affect life as we know it in so many ways,” says Orrett. “For example, in California, our water supply is contingent on rainfall and snowfall. A small change, such as a slight increase in the snow level, has effects all throughout California, like how much water there is and how water is stored.”

Some scientists predict that if carbon dioxide doubles from preindustrial levels, the average earth temperatures will rise between 2.3 F and 7.2 F. They say this could occur as early as 2050.

We All Win

The ICLEI project has sometimes been written off as “not newsworthy.” But locally, at least, just the fact that all the municipalities have agreed on something is worth mentioning. Even more unusual is the upbeat atmosphere surrounding Cities for Climate Protection, especially considering the doomsday implications of global warming.

“Isn’t that amazing that all the cities joined together like that?” says Hancock. “In place after place after place we went to promote this project, it was almost mind-boggling how supportive the councilmembers were. Out of the 50 people we approached, only three people voted against this project.” Hancock was also pleased to see that officials not normally labeled as environmentalists signed on early.

Local governments have embraced this project for several reasons. For one, the seriousness of global warming concerns them. The Cities for Climate Protection seemed a way that the government could take a leadership role with the issue.

“The county realizes that we do have a responsibility in climate protection,” says, Sonoma County supervisor Tim Smith. “If the government leads the way, the effort will grow locally. People say, ‘Gee, things are fine with the climate,’ but there is sufficient evidence out there that everything isn’t fine. We want to leave behind a legacy of a cleaner environment.”

And even if some scientists and activists are still skeptical about global warming, the overall intent of the program is to increase efficiency in governmental operations and to reduce pollution, issues that appeal to most people.

“Even people who are skeptical about global warming are not skeptical about energy conservation and air pollution,” says Santa Rosa City Council member Jane Bender. “By reducing greenhouse gas emissions, we save energy, reduce air pollution, and even save money. It covers a range of interests.”

The Cities for Climate Protection program may also help governments save money. By focusing on efficiency and long-term benefits, the governments often come out ahead. Combining efficiency and using technologically advanced equipment not only reduces greenhouse gases, it can also save thousands of dollars. For example, the new air blowers Santa Rosa is installing at the Laguna Wastewater Treatment Plant will not only use 50 percent less energy and reduce over 2,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year, it will save the city approximately $400,000.

Even though there are potential long-term savings as a result of the program, the changes often cost money to implement, which can be difficult for cash-strapped government budgets.

“Sometimes these changes do save money over a long period of time,” says Ken Wells, director of the Sonoma County Waste Management Agency. “But they usually require an up-front capital expense. That can be a challenge to local governments.”

But, he adds, making efforts to reduce damage to the environment opens the governments up for grant programs and low-interest loans that can help with some of the initial expenses.

Making the Grade

As the majority of cities near the end of phase one of the project, the next step will be to set a target and make a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Santa Rosa and the county released their inventories in late 2002. The inventory found that Santa Rosa emits 40,000 tons of greenhouse gases a year, though much of this is due to the Laguna Wastewater Treatment Plant used by all the cities. Sonoma County emits 37,000 tons of greenhouse gases a year.

Sonoma County has set a target to reduce emissions 20 percent by 2010.
Santa Rosa is considering a target reduction of between 10 percent and 20 percent. Though scientists say greenhouse gas emissions should be reduced by 60 percent to 80 percent, a reduction of 20 percent is an improvement considering that in most cases, greenhouse gases are increasing.

“At least it’s going in the right direction,” says Hancock.

There are a number of ways a government can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, ranging from small to large changes. Santa Rosa and Sonoma County have already done a number of things to reduce emissions. The County landfill already captures 70 percent of the gas given off by the organic waste and converts it to electricity.

Both the city and county are looking at replacing their fleets with fuel-efficient vehicles. In 2002, the county added four hybrid cars to its fleet. The county may change its buses from diesel to natural gas and is also looking at increasing energy efficiency in its detention facilities.

In addition, the city’s new Green Building Implementation Plan, which will be up for a vote in January 2004, will provide holistic guidelines to green building that go beyond the state’s energy efficiency standards. The guidelines are designed to educate and encourage contractors to build longer-lasting, environmentally friendly buildings.

“The program is intended to be on a volunteer bases, not mandatory, and to be of minimal costs,” says Ed Buonaccorsi, general services administrator for the city of Santa Rosa. “It is to educate and encourage this type of construction.”

Action Item

As the Sonoma County and Santa Rosa governments approach the second phase of the project and the other eight cities complete their inventories, the project may largely reduce local greenhouse gas emissions, believes Hancock.

“We collectively have a huge impact on the world,” she says. “I think the program makes a difference. It’s a start in thinking how are we going to keep the world from turning to toast. We do it by moving other people into action.”

“Ann Hancock is a miracle worker,” says Orrett. “Ann’s gift is to bring the elected officials awareness of the problem without a lot of angst and lecturing. She appeals to what’s in their hearts.”

With all the governments on board the project, Hancock has moved on to the next challenge. She has helped create a “Cool Schools” program that encourages schools to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions while educating children on global warming.

“It’s a great thing,” says Hancock. “We have teams of teachers and students recording low-cost ways to reduce emissions. Most of it is this high-tech device called the ‘off’ switch.”

Like Hancock, the ICLEI is also having an impact on the world. The organization’s coalition of 560 governments has reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 10.5 million tons worldwide since 1998, saving over $250 million in the process. In the United States, the ICLEI now represents 17 percent of the population and includes Denver, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Seattle, and others as part of the coalition. And the numbers keep increasing.

“Considering how important these issues are, it makes the most sense to take action,” says ICLEI spokesperson Ryan Bell. “If we’re wrong about global warming, we’ve still helped with issues like reducing air pollutants and cleaning the water. And if we’re right, we’re making a difference in the world while we can.”

A report on the greenhouse gas inventories and a free workshop takes place on Tuesday, Sept. 23, at 8:30am at the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors office, 575 Administration Drive, Santa Rosa. Also see www.skymetrics.us.

From the September 18-24, 2003 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

‘Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues’

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‘Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues’

Shilling for the Blues: Keb’ Mo’ takes part in the public radio component of Martin Scorsese’s blues documentary.

Nothing but the Blues

Will blues artists still be singing the blues after the new PBS series airs?

By Greg Cahill

Here we go again. Every 10 years or so someone proclaims a blues resurgence. You can expect the same in light of the upcoming seven-part PBS-TV documentary series Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues, which debuts Sept. 28 and explores the genre’s roots and delves into its inspirational role in today’s music.

But don’t believe it. In the congressionally designated Year of the Blues, this struggling genre, which enjoys just 1 percent of the market share in U.S. record sales, is on the ropes and fading fast.

Sure, the record-buying public still responds to a superstar like Eric Clapton, but can you name anyone else of his stature capable of crossing over to the lucrative rock market? According to a recent article in Billboard, the 2000 B. B. King-Clapton summit meeting Riding with the King has sold 2 million units to date, and it has dominated the trade magazine’s Top Blues Albums chart since its release.

But even the biggest names in blues fail to generate much action at the cash register these days. Susan Tedeschi’s bestselling Wait for Me has sold just 211,000 albums despite major exposure at the Grammy awards last year, Etta James’ Let’s Roll has sold a modest 36,000 units, and even King’s recent Reflections has sold only 35,000 copies.

Indeed, the recording industry is taking a wait-and-see stance regarding the effect the blues series will have on sales. “If the films convey the excitement and the intensity of emotion of blues, then people will want the music,” Bruce Iglauer, president of the Chicago-based Alligator Records and head of the Blues Music Association trade group, told Billboard recently. “Will it help benefit individual artists or labels? That’s hard for me to tell.”

Certainly, Scorsese–best known as the director of the 1978 music documentary The Last Waltz and such box office hits as Gangs of New York–has taken an unorthodox approach to the series’ format. Unlike documentarian Ken Burns, whose highly touted 2000 Jazz series employed a narrative thread to detail the evolution of jazz in a chronological fashion, Scorsese has enlisted top filmmakers to create their own impressionistic portraits of the genre. The directors are Scorsese, Charles Burnett (To Sleep with Anger), Richard Pearce (Thicker Than Blood), Wim Wenders (Buena Vista Social Club), Clint Eastwood (Bird), Marc Levin (Slam), and Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas).

As a result, some of the segments are straightforward narratives; others are fairly offbeat. For instance, Burnett’s “Warming by the Devil’s Fire” uses a fictional Mississippi family to dramatize the conflicts arising between blues and gospel music, an approach that will send purists into a dither.

Universal Music’s Hip-O label and Sony have teamed up to provide the soundtracks to each of the seven episodes. In addition, there is a five-CD box set, which contains a lot of lo-fi archival recordings that probably won’t win over neophytes; a single CD “best of the blues” disc; 12 artist-specific midline priced compilations; a 13-part Public Radio International series hosted by Keb’ Mo’ and with an afterward by Chuck D (rappers being conspicuously missing from the mix); a companion book; and a five-DVD collector’s edition to be released next year.

Two of the episode soundtracks, Feel Like Going Home and The Soul of a Man, feature newly recorded material by Taj Mahal, Keb’ Mo’, Corey Harris, Ali Farka Toure, Bonnie Raitt, Lucinda Williams, Nick Cave, Los Lobos, and others. All CD titles went on sale last week.

Admittedly, this is an unprecedented amount of exposure for the blues, and one might assume that it couldn’t hurt. But then again, for all its hype, Burns’ generally well-received Jazz series helped to sell records but failed to bolster the fortunes of contemporary players or the genre in general. Three years after the series first aired, the jazz scene is in shambles: jazz clubs are closing across the country, CD sales of the genre’s classic artists have overshadowed those of contemporary proponents, and even Wynton Marsalis, the golden boy of the ’90s young jazz lions and narrator of the Jazz series, is without a label for the first time in his 20-year professional career.

Ultimately, blues artists may be singing the blues for a whole new reason if the PBS series fails to fuel a new fan base.

From the September 18-24, 2003 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

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