Buy one of the following DVDs Richard von Busack mentioned in his article:

‘M. Hulot’s Holiday’

‘Mon Oncle’

‘Fiend Without a Face’

‘The Devil and Daniel Webster’

‘Haxon (Witchcraft Through the Ages)’

Takashi Miike’s ‘Dead or Alive’ (unrated director’s cut)

‘Bob le Flambeur’

‘The Art of Buster Keaton’

‘The Man Who Laughs’

‘Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris’

Buy one of the following SACDs Greg Cahill mentioned in his article:

John Coltrane’s ‘Soultrane’

The Bob Dylan limited edition catalog box set

Jaco Pastorius Big Band’s ‘Word of Mouth Revisited’

Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’

Rachel Podger’s ‘La Stravaganza’

Roxy Music’s ‘Avalon’

Steely Dan’s ‘Gaucho’

Donald Fagen’s ‘Kamakiriad’

Photograph by Mott Jordan

Anger Management: Angry? Let Bobby Bully Bag have it!

Live to Give

‘Tis the season to give until the giving is done

The holiday gift-giving gestalt these past couple of years has been as shrill as 10 pipers piping: America, open for business! Purchasing is patriotic! Don’t bury that tax refund under your mattress–cash it in for CDs!

Thankfully, the recent elf-sized economic upturn seems to have opened a pressure valve somewhere, and we need no longer feel like Osama is hiding in our wallets. This season, we can go back to giving gifts for the simple reason that we like someone, he lives in our household, or she spent one painful afternoon giving birth to us many years ago.

In this gift guide you will find perfect gift ideas for your special somebodies.

The holidays don’t have to be stressful (remember: there’s no “hell” in “holiday”!) as long as a sense of humor reigns. And if that fails, there’s always Aunt Dotty’s holiday eggnog.

–Traci Vogel

Hell’s Jingle Bells

A gift guide based on perennial heart warmers the Seven Deadly Sins

No responsible heathen is unfamiliar with that illustrious codification of spiritual shortcomings known as the Seven Deadly Sins: pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed, and sloth. Is there a secret connection between the seven deadly sins and the Seven Dwarfs or the seven castaways on Gilligan’s Island? You’ll have to decide for yourself. In any event, those seven time-tested foibles make perfect categories for a holiday gift guide. Let us begin.

Pride. Also known as vanity, pride is said to be the most serious of sins, the one from which all others derive. It represents a disproportionate belief in your own abilities, a longing to be important forever. If your loved one secretly desires immortality, give him or her a gift membership in the Alcor Life Extension Foundation (www.alcor.org), the world’s largest and most advanced provider of cryonics technology. Membership includes a free subscription to Cryonics magazine. 877.GO.ALCOR.

Anger. Also known as wrath, anger is the result of someone espousing rage instead of love. What a concept. For that angry person in your life, why not opt for a human-shaped punching bag? You don’t even have to don karate clothing to belt the Bobby Bully Bag right smack in the face. It’s a full size, torso-shaped hanging bag for realistic target training, made from durable PVC and filled with urethane foam. The whole thing weighs 40 pounds–perfect for staged release of raw emotion. Available from Bill Wallace’s Superfoot’s Martial Arts Superstore (www.superfoots.com).

Lust. Lust is the opposite of the heavenly virtue of self-control. What more needs to be said? Whether it’s sex, power, or wealth one lusts after, it makes no difference. Jesus Christ himself said that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery in his heart.” Just substitute www.voyeur-sex-tours.com for “a woman” in that phrase, and you’ve got a nice little sales blurb going. No photo for this one, sorry.

Envy. When it comes down to it, other people are just better looking than you are. You desire their abilities, their social status, their financial situation. When you’re feeling a little self-deprecating or downright jealous, voodoo dolls really do come in handy. Give yourself a gift voodoo kit from Abaxion witchcraft supplies (www.abaxion.com) and let the torture begin. Needles included.

Greed. Also known as covetousness or avarice, greed is the desire for material wealth while ignoring the spiritual world–discounting eternal life for the sake of temporary things. For greed, the punishment in hell is to be boiled alive in oil. But Prov. 15:27 tells us, “He that is greedy of gain troubleth his own house; but he that hateth gifts shall live.” Yes, gifts! A wonderful gift for that greedy one in your life is Arianna Huffington’s wonderful screed Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption Are Undermining America.

Gluttony. Ah, the pleasures of uninhibited excess, the unwarranted desire to consume more than one requires–which does not necessarily equate to being fat. Gluttony is overindulgence in food or drink to the point where it takes away veneration of God. For a truly insatiable gift, give your gluttonous one the Chocolate Party package from www.catalogcity.com. At $94.99, the package includes Ghirardelli cookies and cream bars, 12 Joseph Schmidt truffles, chocolate graham toffee dunks, chocolate-covered pistachios, popcorn drizzled with white and dark chocolate, chocolate-dipped biscotti, and 12 chocolate cable cars.

Sloth. The sweet avoidance of all work, whether it’s spiritual or physical. If you’re just itching for inactivity, then try the Quartz Action Limited Edition Dotclock, which divides the day into 12 important breaks: snooze, nod off, shut eye, nap, 40 winks, chill, dream, lie in, head down, rest, zonked and catch up. Available exclusively at www.spaceruk.com.

Scrooge Buster: For the silent film seeker, cue Kino’s 11-DVD set of ‘Art of Buster Keaton.’

Silver Scene

DVDs for the season, with all the jingle bells and whistles

By

Outside, there are germs. There are muggers, animals that might attack, and teenage snipers gone spiral-eyed from too many viewings of The Matrix. Inside the house, it is warm, safe, and dark, and there is no cover charge. It’s an easy choice.

Buying movies online for loved ones is just as easy a choice; this way, they won’t have to risk the outside world either.

For the most shut-in of the shut-ins, consider a subscription to Netflix (www.netflix.com) for $19.95 per month. The five-year-old website is still the king of online film rental organizations, with free shipping both ways, 15,000 titles, and no overdue fees. At any time, subscribers can keep up to three DVDs indefinitely. Netflix is beginning to offer exclusives, such as the not-to-be-missed documentary Daughter from Danang, and frequent commentary from the knowledgeable and affable film critic James Rocchi.

Few companies are as aptly named as Criterion (“principle taken in standard of judging,” defines the OED). Known for the highest quality film restoration and the utmost in scholarly annotation, Criterion Collection home video (www.criterionco.com) has yards of titles. Too late for the Christmas season (but there’s always Russian Orthodox Christmas) is their long-awaited DVD reissue of M. Hulot’s Holiday and Mon Oncle by Jacques Tati. 1956’s Mon Oncle is a gentle comedy about an out-of-step Parisian remembered especially for its keen satire of architectural crime.

Criterion’s catalogue includes works by Truffaut, Fellini, Hitchcock, and Bergman. The average price for Criterion’s DVDs are steep, though; on Amazon.com, the titles run about $36 per CD. This connoisseur video company also distributes wilder stuff, such as a restored version of 1958’s Fiend without a Face. (The fiend, a flying brain with a prehensile spinal cord, just had a cameo in Looney Tunes: Back in Action.)

Criterion’s film notes say, “Fiend without a Face is presented in its original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.66:1. Created on a high-definition Spirit Datacine and enhanced for 16 x 9 televisions, this new digital transfer was mastered from a 35mm composite fine-grain master. To further enhance the picture, thousands of instances of dirt, debris, and scratches were removed.”

Sweet! I’m not sure what a Spirit Datacine is, but I’m convinced that this is exactly the right tool to restore a flying-brain movie to the visual splendor its creators intended.

Criterion’s selection of classics of the macabre should be popular during the light-starved, ghost-haunted solstice. Check out William Dieterle’s too-little known The Devil and Daniel Webster (perfect viewing in hard and corrupt times). Criterion’s edition of 1922’s Haxon: Witchcraft throughout the Ages was taken from a master owned by the Swedish Film Institute. It is a DVD no Goth should be without.

The even more hardcore person on the holiday list might deserve a treat from Something Weird Video (www.somethingweird.com), earth’s most sumptuous treasure-chest of cine mauvaise. The one-stop shop for the peculiar works of the late Doris Wishman, plus vintage smut, elderly burlesque reels, 12 volumes of old anti-cine16 educational films (titled Campy Classroom Classics), and several volumes of the Dusk to Dawn Trashorama Show of drive-in movie ads and coming attractions. Perfect for that special someone who longs to see the dancing hot dogs cartoon at least once more in their lives. Almost nothing in the Something Weird catalogue is more than $20.

Kino (www.kino.com) is still in the business of rereleasing films for theatrical exhibition, from Takashi Miike’s odd and poetic policiers to J. P. Melville’s Bob le Flambeur. Their site is indispensable for fans of silent film on DVD. If their warehouse was on fire, the first thing I’d grab is the 11-DVD volume Art of Buster Keaton ($160). Most of Kino’s DVDs are priced in the neighborhood of about $20.

Some of the newest offerings are hard-to-find films by Paul Leni, an expressionist master who died too young. His movie Waxwork (1924), set in a wax museum, is one of the first horror anthology films. Leni’s The Man Who Laughs (1928) stars Conrad Veidt as the disfigured antihero. Veidt gave Batman’s creator Bob Kane the idea for what the Joker should look like.

Just past the 25th anniversary of Jacques Brel’s death, Kino offers Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris (about $20), the first release of a musical review, out of print for decades. The songs include Brel himself singing his “Ne Me Quitte Pas.” Brel’s cabaret music will apply to the listener a layer of class and world-weariness as thick as the lacquer on a Lexus.

With the help of such websites, you can transform your and your loved ones TVs into shrines of cinema greatness, while the rest of the world goes nuts outside.

It’s a 5.1 World

2003 surround-sound market starts with a whisper, ends with a bang

By Greg Cahill

This will go down in history as the month the recording industry got serious about multichannel sound, even as rumors floated online that Sony–one of the innovators of Super Audio Compact Discs–plan to bail out of the market.

Whereas both DVD-Audio and SACD have entered the marketplace in drips and drabs in the past couple of years to capitalize on the burgeoning home-theater craze, the labels have now turned the spigot on full blast with dozens of titles pouring into the stores every few days. Those recent releases range from classic titles by Elton John (Goodbye Yellow Brick Road) and the Who (Tommy) to new releases by Robert Cray (Time Will Tell) and Ludacris (Chicken-N-Beer)–all brought to you in often beautiful sounding and always confusingly competing formats.

Many consumers got a first taste of this audiophile-for-the-masses craze last month when Rolling Stone magazine included in its 500 Greatest Albums of All Time issue an eight-page ad that promotes the Super Audio CD format. The ad includes a hybrid-layer surround-sound SACD with selections from several of the issue’s picks performed by Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, the Who, Herbie Hancock, Norah Jones, Elton John, Billy Joel, Miles Davis, and Aerosmith.

Who can keep up with this deluge of remastered music? Still, here are a few favorites from the past year that kept me chasing the ever-elusive perfect audio experience (and helped keep a couple of local home-theater equipment shops in business).

John Coltrane, Soultrane (Mobile Fidelity). Not all good things come in 5.1 surround-sound packaging. This classic 1958 recording featured the jazz legend on tenor sax backed by Red Garland (piano), Paul Chambers (bass), and Arthur Taylor (drums), and it has never sounded better than on this restored mono SACD version.

Bob Dylan, various titles (Columbia). One of the most anticipated SACD releases of the year found 15 titles, from the landmark 1962 release The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan to the recent Love and Theft. Not everyone agreed on the selection (a lot of folks could have lived without Street Legal or even Planet Waves in lieu of more recent titles), but most agree that Dylan’s catalog sounded terrible. These digitally remastered discs, especially Blood on the Tracks, are a marked improvement. Five titles even sport 5.1 surround sound.

Jaco Pastorius Big Band, Word of Mouth Revisited (Telarc/Heads Up). A who’s who of electric bassists join former bandmates of the late, great Jaco Pastorius (who played bass for Weather Report, Joni Mitchell, and others) on one of the best-sounding jazz SACDs released this year. Impressive all around (and Telarc has emerged as one of the most trusted labels in the surround-sound industry; you can’t go wrong with these guys if your thing is blues, jazz, or classical).

Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon (Capitol). One of the greatest rock albums of all time is one helluva surround disc, though a few audiophiles squabbled over the quality of the hybrid stereo mix. Is it better than the Mobile Fidelity gold-plated Ultradisc version from a few years back? Not really, just different. But the new surround mix really brings out both the nuances (I didn’t realize just how much swearing there is in the incidental chatter on this album) and the sledge-hammer sonic effects. I own this in every format and every version ever released–hell, why not?

Rachel Podger, La Stravaganza (Channel Classics). This young British virtuoso violinist captured a coveted Gramophone magazine award and a lot of hearts with this stunning two-disc set of 12 violin concertos (the seldom-recorded op. 4) by Antonio Vivaldi. Go for Baroque!

Roxy Music, Avalon (Virgin). The British art-rock band regrouped in 1982 to record their swan song. The result was one of the most sophisticated and gorgeous pop albums of all time. This Dutch SACD does it justice, making spare use of the surround effects and highlighting the seductive synthesizers and Bryan Ferry’s wistful vocals.

Steely Dan, Gaucho (MCA). One of the few rock albums released on both SACD and DVD-A. In fact, this classic 1980 album, the band’s last studio release for 16 years, was one of the first surround-sound releases. But that DVD-A version suffered from serious problems, most notably the unbearably shrill horns that emanated from the rear channel. This new SACD is as smooth as the duo’s jazz-inflected pop.

Donald Fagen, Kamakiriad (Rhino/Warner/Reprise). Ten years ago, Fagen, one half of Steely Dan, unleashed this oddball solo concept album (based on a futuristic car and space girls, no less) to little fanfare. This is one of the best examples of DVD-A enhancing a mediocre album. The disc (playable on any DVD player and offering several surround-sound options) sparkles with great graphics, lyrics, a photo gallery, a behind-the-scenes documentary, and a pair of playful music videos for “Snowbound” and “Tomorrow’s Girls.” It’s a perfect match for Fagen’s earlier Nightfly on DVD-A and, one could say, fulfills the promise made at the dawn of the CD age that every disc one day would feature a smorgasbord of flashy eye and ear candy. Fagen got one thing right–the future is now.

The Holiday Sock: Handmade gifts at www.buyolympia.com please even the most rebellious.

Dot-Calm

The Mouse Potato’s Guide to Holiday Shopping

By Christina Waters

You know who you are. Like me, you do a little web shopping even while surfing the Internet for legit job-related purposes. And more than once, you’ve ordered that perfect J.Crew tank top, video game, or DVD release simply by clicking your trusty mouse on the “Order Now” button.

The good news is that you can just as easily point and click your way through your entire holiday shopping list from the comfort of your own keyboard. No shuffling through crowded malls, no soggy umbrellas, and no parking problems. You just sit at your computer and follow our suggestions for absolutely perfect gifts for everybody on your list. You click, they ship. The biggest no-brainer on the planet.

Here’s how it works. Visualize yourself driving over to the Santa Rosa Plaza and swimming upstream toward Banana Republic to snap up one of those hot pink cashmere hooded sweaters for your sweetie, who is so Gwyneth Paltrow.

Now visualize this. Dial www.bananarepublic.com and scroll through the colorful visual menus, find the item you want, click on it (oh, and you do have to provide some method of payment), and it can be delivered to your sweetie, complete with a card from you. Or have it delivered to you, you wrap it up, add a personal card, and deliver it yourself to the lucky recipient. How easy can shopping get?

Here are a few online hot spots to get you started, both mainstream and not-so-mainstream.

Thrill your kids with a personalized letter from Santa, available at www.santamail.org.

Choose heavenly makeup, fragrance, and body lotions in luxurious gift sets at www.sephora.com.

Does someone on your list adore vintage clothing? Then check out the amazing selection of real and faux Victorian jewelry and clothing at www.artandartifact.com. Jewelry practically falls off the keyboard at various sites, including the excellent www.gemstones.com–don’t miss the Amulet.com listing while you’re there.

Need something to raise those holiday pulses? Then get on over to www.trashy.com and ogle the inventive lingerie sets–naughty micropleated skirts with matching bras, that sort of fun. Don’t miss inspired items like the leopard-print bustiers, from www.cameolingerie.com. For off-the-beaten-track bedroom accessories, look no further than www.stormyleather.com. You gotta love a website that offers “whips, floggers, and paddles.”

Everybody knows about the goodies galore–books, DVDs, CDs, computer toys– at the mighty www.Amazon.com. But for rare, used, and out-of-print books, also check out www.powells.com and www.abebooks.com. And if you’re one of those budget-minded consumers who likes to comparison shop, use www.pricegrabber.com to make sure you’re getting the best deal.

Specialty paraphernalia to please the meditation fanatic, like hand-painted tankas from Nepal can be found at www.dharmacrafts.com. Gourmet gifts are as easy as www.epicurious.com, where you’ll find delicious packages of everything from cheeses and imported gravlax, to caviar and chocolate. Thrill your mom with a half pound of deluxe truffles for $46. Surprise the cook with must-have, hand-harvested sea salt from far-flung regions like Brittany, Wales, Sicily, Maine, and Hawaii at www.saltworks.us.

If something even more exotic is craved, try the natural beef, lamb and pork specialty cuts from Niman Ranch at www.nimanranch.com (and click on Products).

Does someone need a Poppie French tank ($110)? A Dede Metal diamond choker ($115)? An e.vil “Fame: I Wanna Live Forever” pullover hooded sweatshirt ($92)? You’ll find all this and more at www.girlshop.com; equally fantastic men’s gifts are available at www.guyshop.com.

Get even funkier with the Olympia, Wash. DIY collective www.buyolympia.com, where you can get your favorite punk-rock sock monkey ($25), blank journals by Amber Bell ($25), and customizable sterling silver ID bracelets by Dottyspeck ($42).

If you can’t find the perfect gift online, it doesn’t exist.

From the December 11-17, 2003 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Location, Location, Location: Work from Barry Singer Gallery looks fine on most any wall. Shown: ‘Horse Study 7–Other Series’ by Juliet van Otteren.

Livin’ la Vida Local

From fine art to fine guitars, fine food to fine crafts, gifts that come from local artisans are just plain fine

By Davina Baum, Gretchen Giles, David Templeton, and R. V. Scheide

Pretend for a moment that Christmas is an easy time of year, a subtle and calm moment in which the checkbook and the bank balance meet in sweet agreement, where money can and should just sort of flow in a chocolatey and reasonable way to those who best deserve it. Now consider where that river should both source and end. Luxuriating in the subtle and the calm, a sober gift-giver concludes that this cascading tributary of creamy largesse should naturally end with those best-beloveds, and that the cold hard cash of gift giving might begin not with crafts this year, but, rather, with art.

(This is not to say that crafts don’t have a large barge to float upon the gift-giving stream. Indeed, they do. Those artifacts, for example, found and savagely purchased at the annual Dance Palace Holiday Crafts Fair–slated this year for Dec. 5-7 in Pt. Reyes Station–are recalled in awe-struck tones by those hoping to once again open a simple wrapping enclosing silk handmade handbags wrought entirely from antique kimonos.)

But this year we direct you to a few examples of art that you can buy for less than or just around (gulp) a grand. But borrowing from the haggard home remodeler in referring to a thousand dollars as “a unit,” it magically becomes far less dollars, truly.

The Barry Singer Gallery (7 Western Ave., Petaluma. Open Tuesday-Saturday, 11am-6pm. 707.781.3200) specializes in photography, a high art that many find to be an easier art. For its “Holiday Show IV,” exhibiting through Jan. 17, the Singer goes crazy for color, mostly featuring hand-tinted and straightforward color photographs, though a few of the featured artists work solely in black and white.

A trained architect and painter who of necessity constantly had to photograph his work and found himself liking the result more than his other efforts, Jeffrey Becom’s bold abstract shots of wildly pigmented Latin American walls and buildings ($550-$950) offer luscious licks of pure true hue. Forestville enologist Sondra Barrett captures the rigidly psychedelic structures of wine molecules in her vivid prints, and Albert Koetsier’s elegant shots of fuschias and tulips ($300-$400), captured with a homemade X-ray machine hand-built by the artist, are starkly gorgeous.

Brigitte Carnochan hand-tints each black-and-white print she makes of creamy magnolias, earthy nudes, and other planetbound blooms ($1,500-$2,000). Juliet von Otteren’s startling horse-head shots ($800) and a satisfying clutch of unframed Betti Page pinups ($550-$750), all curves and fleshy derriere, are also available.

A collective of some 32 artists now in its 25th year, Artisans Gallery (78 E. Blithedale Ave., Mill Valley; open Tuesday-Saturday, 11am-6pm, and Sunday, noon-5pm; 415.388.2044) exhibits its annual “Holiday Gifts Invitational” through Dec. 31. Casting a national call for artists, Artisans receives a reliable slate of excellence for its open shows.

Of the regular members, Sheila Tuffanelli’s brass mesh covering for an unlikely head, Hard Hat 1 ($200), Cathy Coe’s structural monoprints ($275), and Nini Linn’s swift pastels and watercolors of drawing-class models ($125 unframed), are each uniquely qualified for the art of gift receipt.

Santa Rosa’s A Street Gallery (312 S. A St.; open Wednesday-Saturday, noon-5pm; 707.578.9124) presents “House Show” through Jan. 24, exhibiting the work of those artists who maintain studios in the warren behind the gallery proper. Painter D. A. Bishop’s eerily mannered still-lifes of buildings and cars are perhaps least expensively purchased when hung just steps from his easel. Other exhibitors include Dominic Egan’s handsome, “what are they?” photographs and work by printmaker Max DuBois, sculptor Virginia Harrison, gallery owner Andrea Speer Hibbard, painter Brad Huck, and glass artisan Laurence.

Slightly younger than the Artisans Gallery, the Gallery Route One (11101 Hwy. 1, Pt. Reyes Station; open Wednesday-Monday, 11am-5pm; 415.663.1347) just celebrated its 20th anniversary as an artists’ collective. Opening Dec. 5 with “Expect the Unexpected,” showing through Jan. 4, the main gallery features work by GRO artists in all media, with a reception on Sunday, Dec. 7, from 3pm to 5pm.

The back gallery boasts an exploration of natural eroticism by recent juried show winner Virginia Shepley titled “Garden: Cut-Outs and Other Works on Paper.” While Shepley’s is largely an installation, some of her drawings of phallic grasses and malevolent biology will be for sale. Small works in the gallery foyer retail for around $75.

—Gretchen Giles

Holiday Burl-esque

Nothing says North Bay quite like redwood burl art. Scientifically known as lignotubers (Latin for “woody swelling”), burls are the knobby, gnarled growths found at the base of some redwood trees. Burls are removed during the harvesting process and fetch a high price from both artists and woodworkers, who prize burls for their irregular shapes and unique wood grain. Burls have been made into everything from refrigerator magnets to 8-foot-tall chain-saw sculptures of Bigfoot.

You won’t find big pieces like Bigfoot at the Burl Shop (16780 Armstrong Woods Road, Guerneville; 707.869.1110), but just about everything else is there, from toothpick holders to wall clocks, ranging in price from $2 to $250.

“It’s not as extensive as it used to be, because burl is getting harder to get,” says Burl Shop owner Fred Waszak. “Burl occurs naturally only in one of every 1,000 redwood trees.”

Big pieces such as Bigfoot and bear sculptures have become rarer–which is fine by Waszak, because he was tired of throwing his back out moving them around. Waszak says the nature of his clientele makes it hard to pin down which burl art pieces are the most popular nowadays.

“We’ve always prided ourselves on our distinctive gifts,” he said. “People who like distinctive gifts don’t follow the crowd.”

Waszak says he deals with only reputable artists and craftspeople to avoid so-called bootleg burl–burl that is harvested illegally, sometimes from still-living trees.

“Everything has to be labeled and documented,” adds Tom Vinci, owner of Santa Rosa’s Bellevue Burl (628 Bellevue Ave.; 707.579.2009; open by appointment only). If a piece of burl’s origin is in question or cannot be certified, he won’t buy it, because it might be bootleg. His shop offers burl clocks, tables, and custom furniture ranging in price from $15 to $5,000.

Redwood burl gift items are also available at Aramark Muir Woods Gift Shop, Muir Woods National Monument, Mill Valley, 415.388.7059.

–R. V. Scheide

Local Luthiers Fretting

Why have so many professional luthiers settled in the North Bay? Could it be the close proximity to a steady supply of Humboldt County’s finest agricultural product? No. That would be guitar players, not guitar makers, and even granting that many luthiers also play the instruments they make, that still wouldn’t explain the dozens of professional guitar makers who’ve set up shop in the area.

But it does explain how holiday shoppers can purchase absolutely the best acoustic guitar money can buy for their favorite musician–as long as said favorite musician can wait six months, a year, or even longer for the new guitar to be made, since most of the local luthiers work well in advance of ordering deadlines.

The best bet to score a handmade guitar this Christmas may be Andrew McSpadden. He makes guitars on spec for local music stores, so occasionally he’ll have a new one available for sale on short notice. Prices are around $2,000. Call him at 707.433.3004 to see what he’s got in stock.

“There are basically three reasons why the area is so popular with guitar makers,” McSpadden says. The first and arguably most important is the climate’s predictable levels of humidity. The second is the Bay Area’s reputation as a center for creativity. The third is Luthiers Mercantile International, the world renowned source for wood and other guitar-making supplies located in Healdsburg at 412 Moore Lane. It’s the perfect place to pick up a gift for the hard-to-please luthier on your list. Call 707.433.1823 or visit www.lmii.com.

Probably the most well-known of the local luthiers is Sonoma’s Steve Klein, who’s made guitars for the likes of Steve Miller, Joni Mitchell, Joe Walsh, Bill Frisell, and Lou Reed. Acoustic guitars made by Klein start at around $9,000, so make sure your favorite musician has at least had some guitar lessons before placing your order. Klein Guitars, 521 Broadway, Sonoma. 707.996.2196. www.kleinguitars.

“The scene has changed so much in the last 20 years,” says Taku Sakashta, another local luthier. “But there always seems to be a critical mass of good talent around here.” To order one of Sakashta’s creations, call 707.823.0284 or visit www.sakashtaguitars.com.

Other local luthiers (there literally are too many too list all of them) include Eric Monrad (707.838.7823; www.monradguitars.com), the famous Tom Ribbecke (707.433.3778; www.ribbecke.com), Michael Hemkin (707.963.8256), Bruce Sexauer (707.782.1044; www.sexauerluthier.com), and Harry Fleishman, who also conducts guitar-building classes (707.823.3537).

–R.S.

Lip-Smacking Sustainability

Thanksgiving Coffee is an example for all local businesses to follow, whether they’re in the coffee business or not. Recently outfitted with a fleet of biodiesel trucks, the organic, fair-trade coffee company shuttles its goods here and there with an entirely clear conscience. Gift givers can take part in the goodness by giving a Thanksgiving Coffee Company gift basket. This isn’t your typical gift basket–Thanksgiving fills each one to the gills with thematically appropriate goodies.

The Song Bird Mystery basket ($31.50) comes with two packages of coffee–Song Bird Nicaraguan and Song Bird French Roast–packed fresh when you order it. Your lucky recipient will also get a copy of Death of a Songbird, Christine Goff’s murder mystery about shade-grown coffee and birdwatching; a Thanksgiving Coffee logo mug; and an Ecopapel calendar, handmade by a women’s coop in Ecuador.

The Wyland basket ($47) comes with five varieties of certified organic coffee, packaged with Wyland’s famous marine wildlife images, as well as the Ecopapel calendar. Other baskets celebrate chocolate lovers, Hanukkah, tea drinkers, and more. Unfortunately, they’re not available at the Sebastopol outlet store but via the magic of the Internet (and the telephone). See www.thanksgivingcoffee.com or call 800.648.6491.

–Davina Baum

Sky with Diamonds

The days of asking an attractive, young person to come home with you from a party so they could see the stars on your ceiling are (hopefully) long gone. Those phosphorescent stickers are a great novelty, but a Windsor professional can do a much better job at approximating the night sky on your ceiling. StarMurals’ “startist” Rip Read will come to your house and turn your bedroom–or living room or bathroom or any room–into a home planetarium. Using an entirely nontoxic acrylic paint infused with phosphorescent crystals, Read will paint an astronomically correct skyscape wherever you please. The paint absorbs light during the day and releases it at night, making the stars glow. The whole painting process usually takes about four hours and lasts until you paint over it. If you drink too much wine, maybe you’ll see a shooting star. Read has opened a gallery in Windsor (930 Shiloh Road, Building 44, Ste. H) so that you can see the stars in action before you commit. Call 707.838.4846 or see www.starmurals.com for more information.

–D.B.

Clock Watching

There are cuckoo clocks and then there are cuckoo clocks (as in, you know, clocks that are kind of cuckoo). Mike Weller of Napa is the artistically demented mastermind behind a series of outrageous, whimsically whacked-out clocks, attractively and brightly painted creations that look like something Dr. Seuss would dream up as a thank-you gift for the Cat in the Hat. Oddly shaped, multicolored assemblages of wooden knobs and doodads, stars and moons, these one-of-a-kind accessories (which start at about $150) are cartoons brought to life. The most amusing feature is the cordlike pendulum–if you can call it that–which does not swing back and forth so much as it, well, wiggles and bobs and, uh, dances. There are wall-mounted and freestanding varieties, which can be seen and purchased at Gallery One stores in Petaluma and Sonoma. 209 Western Ave. in Petaluma (707.778.8277) and 115 E. Napa in Sonoma (707.938.9190).

–David Templeton

Seaweed! In Petaluma?

Benedetta Fresh Aromatheraputics, a small, pioneering company founded by “botanical intuitive” Julia Faller, produces a line of all-organic skin-care products that includes several alchemical delights with names like Crystal Radiance Hydrating Elixir and the mysterious Clearing Spray, which turns out to be an “organic-biodynamic hand sanitizer.” The Petaluma company also offers slightly more mundane stuff, such as a skin-sensitive blemish treatment called Control Crème, and various nourishing facial oils, moisturizers, and face cleansers.

But when scanning Benedetta’s product list, what really jumps out are the Seaweed Bath and the Anti-Wrinkle Seaweed Mask. The mask is a blending of spirulina, organic lavender, and nine different kinds of seaweed, all combined into a nonclay face-mask treatment that is rumored to leave your face feeling ready for prime time. The Seaweed Bath is a luxurious, therapeutic body treatment that, according to one Benedetta brochure, combines the arts of balneotherapy (which basically means taking a bath), thalassotherapy (therapy that comes from the sea), and aromatherapy, which probably needs no parenthetical interpretation. The seaweed bath is both relaxing and pampering, the perfect gift for all those stressed-out people on your shopping list.

Benedetta products can be ordered through the company’s website (www.benedetta.com) or by calling them at 888.868.8331.

–D.T.

A Maze Man

Larry Evans is a Petaluma painter and architectural artist with a knack for intricacy and detail. Several years ago, he started combining his various skills in painting wonderfully elaborate mazes, amusing pieces of art that engaged the mind as well as the eye. It all began while vacationing with his family in Hawaii. When the kids began demanding mental stimulation beyond what they could see all around them, Evans sketched out a maze on a paper bath mat from the hotel they were staying in. It was a hit, and Evans ended up using a lot more bath mats before the vacation was over. The rest is maze history.

Though still in demand for his architectural work, Petaluma’s favorite maze man is now known around the world for his brain-teasing treats. These have been published in various forms, from books (more than 30 of them so far) to jigsaw puzzles to calendars. Last year, Evans’ mighty mazes were published in a daily calendar form by Accord Publishing, and it was so popular that a whole new Maze-a-Day Calendar has been brought back for 2004.

Perfect as a brain-warming gift to maze-minded friends and family, the calendar is pretty much what it sounds like: a daily parade of mazes which vary from day to day in how challenging they are. Solutions are shown on the reverse side of each maze, and at $11.99, they are extremely affordable. Available at local Copperfield’s Bookstores.

–D.T.

State Bird Houses

It takes but a few short seconds to be charmed and enthralled by the eye-catching birdhouses of Bob Bally. Made out of license plates from all 50 of our country’s states, these affordable avian domiciles look like the tiny homes of junkyard gnomes. The birdhouses feature roofs made of actual shingles, with chimneys fashioned out of old wine-bottle corks.

Bally has been selling the houses through select galleries from Cambria and Tahoe City and Redondo Beach to Eugene and Portland, Ore. Currently, the only place one can find the houses in this area is at the Gallery One shops in Petaluma and Sonoma. “They’re more popular with people than with birds,” Bally says, “though there are some little songbirds that will inhabit them. I like that.”

–D.T.

Vinegar, Sweet Vinegar

Vinegar has a bad rap. It’s that sour thing, and having that “piss and vinegar” phrase lurking around everywhere doesn’t help. Vinegar is wine that has gone through a secondary fermentation; the alcohol is acted upon by bacteria, converting it to acid. The misconception that vinegar is just wine gone bad is perfectly righted by just one taste of artisan vinegar.

Located way out in Angwin, east of St. Helena, Sparrow Lane produces perfectly crafted vinegars in premium varietals–Champagne, Cabernet Sauvignon, Zinfandel. Their clean, bright tastes and relatively low acidity makes them perfect additions to just about any dish. The Golden Balsamic is smooth and rich, lighter than traditional balsamic. It brightens up salads and brings nuance to summer fruit. The Cabernet Sauvignon is delightfully smoky. The attractive 375 ml bottles make great gifts, selling for $9 each. An assorted case of 12 bottles is available at $100, for the vinegar enthusiast. The vinegars are available at Williams-Sonoma, Dean and Deluca, and online at www.katzandco.com.

–D.B.

From the December 4-10, 2003 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Image Courtesy of the Miwok Archeological Preserve of Marin

Lost Faces: Ethnographer Isabel Kelly studied the Coast Miwok Indians of Marin and southern Sonoma counties, including the family of Maria Copa, whose grandmother is shown at left. Kelly’s work is compiled in ‘Interviews with Tom Smith and Maria Copa.’

The Graton Band’s Last Stand

It’s money, not morals, that stands between the pro and con casino forces

By R. V. Scheide

“I became Indian. I ignored her. Silence, the Indian’s best weapon, an aunt of mine once said. Be an Indian, cut yourself off with silence any way you can. Don’t talk. Don’t give yourself away.”
—Greg Sarris, “Reading Narrated American Indian Lives,” from his 1993 collection of essays, Keeping Slug Woman Alive.

Greg Sarris strides into the lobby of the Rohnert Park Doubletree Inn on a sunny afternoon in mid-October, running late as usual, slight beads of perspiration running down his forehead and neck and disappearing down a long-sleeved white shirt open to the second button.

The chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria has just returned from Paris, where, in his other persona as Loyola Marymount University professor and critically acclaimed author, he attended a conference on Native Americans with other scholars and American Indians.

The French, he ruefully notes as he sits down and stretches his long legs out under a coffee table, were much more interested in the Indians dressed in authentic beaded and feathered costume than with the academics.

Sarris is rendezvousing at the Doubletree with 30 or so members of the Graton band in preparation for that night’s Rohnert Park City Council meeting, where the tribe’s proposed megacasino and resort was topic A on the agenda. In roughly an hour, they’ll be facing down hundreds of Rohnert Park citizens angered by what they view as the behind-closed-doors agreement between the city council and the tribe that permitted a casino to invade their community without public input. On this night, they’ll get a chance to voice their opposition.

The anticasino activists claim the proposed 360-acre casino, hotel, and restaurant development will exacerbate Rohnert Park’s already significant traffic problems, deplete the region’s scarce water supply, degrade the environment, and create more crime in the area, thereby destroying the city’s way of life. The leader of the opposition, Assembly of God pastor Chip Worthington, openly calls the conflict over the casino a “cultural war.”

The Graton band insists that the $200 million it has agreed to give to the city over the next 20 years will offset the casino’s impact on the community, in addition to putting Rohnert Park’s strapped city budget back in the black. But since no study has yet been done to determine the actual dollar value of those impacts, opponents say the deal is not good enough. Since August, when the tribe announced it was relocating its proposed Indian gaming facility from the Sears Point area to Rohnert Park, the debate has become increasingly incendiary.

Missing from the argument over the casino, at least so far, has been any discussion of gambling’s moral implications. Neither Sarris nor Worthington really views the present conflict over gambling as an ethical issue. That seems odd, because both have been influenced by religions that morally prohibit gambling.

Sarris in particular has been heavily influenced by the Bole Maru, the spiritual resistance movement that helped rescue Northern California Indian tribes such as the Southern Pomo and the Coast Miwok–the ancestors of the present-day Graton band–from the brink of extermination.

Among its many tenets, the Bole Maru forbids mixing blood with whites, drinking alcohol, and gambling. Without the resistance movement, the Graton band might not exist today. Now, ironically, the tribe has turned toward gambling for its survival. Whether it is moral or not is of little concern to either side. In our culture, money talks and morality walks.

As the battle over the casino has heated up, media access to tribal members has been strictly limited. The Graton band have preferred to communicate through a well-organized public-relations campaign rather than grant interviews. Sarris agreed to an interview with the Bohemian after being told the topic of the discussion would be the morality of gambling and how it relates to the Bole Maru.

Flanked by tribal vice-chair Lorelle Ross and tribal secretary Jeanette Anglin, Sarris is no longer the young man gazing out from the back-cover jacket photographs of novels such as Watermelon Nights and Grand Avenue. The shock of black hair has receded and is flecked with gray; faint worry lines crease his face.

But at 52, Sarris–who is of Kashaya (southwestern coastal Pomo), Filipino, and Jewish descent–is still tall and good-looking, with wide shoulders and a thick chest that betray heavy gym work. The heavily caffeinated Ripped Force sports drink he’s sipping cuts through the jet lag fast as Sarris warms to the topic of the Bole Maru.

The Bole Maru was an amalgamation of traditional Native American spiritual beliefs and Victorian-era Christianity. The movement’s origin dates to 1870, when migrant Pomos brought first word of the Ghost Dance from Nevada’s Paiute tribe to Northern California. Stressing resistance to cultural assimilation, the Bole Maru ironically borrowed many of its tenets from white culture, including religious-based prohibitions against alcohol and gambling.

“When the first Dreamer, Richard Taylor, came back [from Nevada], he saw the people in great disarray,” Sarris says. “There was drinking, there was a sense that it was all over.”

For up to 10 millennia, Northern California’s Indians enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with nature that, according to the somewhat romanticized vision of Vinson Brown and Douglas Andrews in The Pomo Indians of California and Their Neighbors, enabled each tribe member to “relate himself deeply to his environment, the woods, the waters, the rocks, the plants, the animals and birds, and other creatures in a way that modern man has surely forgotten.”

Squabbles between neighboring tribes were infrequent; California’s fearsome ecology–featuring drought, flooding, earthquakes, and Mt. Konocti’s eruption 5,000 years ago–was the major enemy.

The Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok occupied what is now southern Sonoma County and northwest Marin County. At the peak of their civilization, they numbered 20,000. They lived in round thatched huts clumped together in small villages of 600 to 1,000 inhabitants known as tribelets, and used their prodigious talent for weaving to make baskets for cooking, storing acorns and water, and for devising ingenious traps to capture fish, rabbits, and other wild game.

Nothing in the Indians’ 10,000 years of existence prepared them for the arrival of the Europeans. By the time the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill brought European-Americans flooding into California in 1849, the tribal populations had already been reduced by an estimated 90 percent from the deprivation and disease inflicted by the Spanish and Russian fur traders during the past century and a half.

But if the Spanish and Russians were brutal, the Americans turned out to be oppressors par excellence. The Indians were quickly pushed into the wilderness; many were massacred in cold blood, such as the band of 188 Lake Pomos–men, women, and children–cornered on a small island in Clear Lake that were slaughtered by U.S. Army troops in 1850. Today, only a small plaque next to a grassy knoll not too far from the Robinson Rancheria and Bingo Casino in Nice commemorates the Bloody Island Massacre.

When the Gold Rush was over, the number of the Graton band’s ancestors had dwindled to 20. Without the Bole Maru, the tribe may have never recovered. “The purpose of the Bole Maru was strictly functional: to rebuild a tribe that had been decimated,” Sarris says. “What it did was rebuild the tribe so that the old blood lines were developed.”

The movement’s spiritual leaders were known as Dreamers. They drew upon visions from dreams and dance-induced trances to guide their respective communities through the lean years of the early 20th century, when the federal government and the state of California banished so-called homeless Indians to small rancherias, often in the middle of nowhere.

The Bole Maru rules were harsh, tolerating no mixing of blood between Indians and whites. If Kashaya-Philipino-Jewish Sarris had existed during its early years, he might have been killed at birth or at least banished from the tribe. The prohibitions against drinking alcohol and gambling, adapted from Christian morality, were designed to thwart unscrupulous whites who used liquor and games of chance to pry away from them what little wealth indigenous people had.

“Mabel McKay was the last of the Bole Maru Dreamers,” Sarris says, speaking of the internationally renowned Pomo medicine woman and basket weaver about whom he wrote the biography Mabel McKay: Weaving the Dream. McKay, who passed away in 1993, claimed that the intricate designs for her baskets came from her dreams, and in much the same way, the Bole Maru Dreamers wove the fabric of the material and spiritual worlds together in a blueprint for survival. Something worked, and the Graton band now claims 568 certified members.

Sarris neither drinks alcohol nor gambles and says he’s been heavily influenced by Bole Maru Dreamers like McKay and the late Essie Parrish. Nevertheless, he sees no conflict between the Bole Maru’s prohibition against gambling and the Graton band’s effort to establish a casino in Rohnert Park.

“The Bole Maru doesn’t exist anymore,” he says. “It was a remarkable thing what they did, to keep the tribe going.” But even Dreamers like Essie Parrish eventually backed off the movement’s strict antiassimilation doctrine, he adds. “She said go to school, integrate, we need to survive.”

The Bole Maru borrowed freely from Christian doctrine. Although the Bible contains no passages that specifically forbid gambling, many clerics have long insisted that the teachings of Jesus are incompatible with indulging in games of chance. In a 1999 article for nonprofit conservative Christian group Focus on the Family, writer Ronald Reno cites numerous Biblical passages that have been interpreted in such a manner.

“Jesus commanded, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself (Mark 12:31),'” he writes. “Gambling, meanwhile, is predicated on the losses, pain, and suffering of others.”

Studies have shown that up to 10 percent of those who gamble may have problems controlling their gambling activity, leading to familial problems such as divorce, bankruptcy, child abuse, domestic violence, crime, and suicide. Allowing fellow human beings to suffer thus is immoral, Reno insists, because it violates the commandment to love thy neighbor.

As Reno correctly notes, studies have also shown that poor people tend to gamble in numbers larger than their proportion in the population. “Scripture exhorts us to look out for the poor and disadvantaged, and issues strong warning against taking advantage of their plight,” he says, citing passages such as Prov. 14:21, 14:31, and 22:16.

Gambling also violates the Protestant work ethic. “Work has been part of God’s design for mankind from the very beginning. We are to invest our time and energies into labors that supply our needs and those of our families (Prov. 31, 2 Thess. 3:10, 1 Tim. 5:8), and that allow us to share with others (Eph. 4:28). Gambling, meanwhile, portends something for nothing.”

Since Florida’s Seminole tribe opened the first Indian casino two decades ago, the opposition to the subsequent national gambling boom has been led by Christian ministers, so it’s no surprise that the opposition to the proposed Rohnert Park casino is led by Assembly of God pastor Chip Worthington. What is surprising is that Worthington doesn’t see this as a religious or moral battle.

“This is a cultural war,” he says via telephone from his church office. “The culture of Rohnert Park is family-oriented, with many parks and schools and nice neighborhoods, and a lifestyle that is dominated by families getting together to have barbecues. Culturally, gambling will destroy this city.”

When asked to talk about the religious aspects of his antigaming stance, Worthington says, “It’s the Protestant work ethic. You work hard, you invest your money, you save it in the bank, and over time, you prosper,” he says. “I believe the get-rich-quick morality of Indian gaming is wrong.” However, he insists that casino opponents are not the religious zealots portrayed by local media, but concerned citizens who are mad as hell and not willing to take it anymore.

“Religion and ethics have little to do with this; it’s all about the almighty dollar,” says the Assembly of God pastor. “If we held to our religion and ethics, there probably wouldn’t be any gambling.”

And the genocide of Native Americans might never have occurred, he could have added. Perhaps 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was correct when he wrote, “The last Christian died on the cross.”

Asked to explain what he means by “cultural war,” Worthington leaves the Graton band out of the picture, framing the conflict as one between Rohnert Park citizens concerned about the environment, traffic, crime, and potentially declining home values, and Station Casinos, the Nevada-based gaming company providing financial backing to the proposed casino. Estimates of the proposed casino’s annual take have ranged from $150 million to $500 million.

“Basically, what they want to do is drain our local economy,” he says. By federal law, Stations, which will operate the casino for the tribe, is allowed to collect as much as 50 percent of the casino’s annual revenue. Like the revenue earned by big-box stores like Home Depot, that money will leave the county. That still leaves the $200 million over the next 20 years the tribe has agreed to give to the city, but that isn’t enough for Worthington.

“If they were negotiating with me, they would be giving us a lot more money,” he says.

Apparently, everyone in Babylon has his price.

Sarris and Worthington are a study in contrasts. One leads the push to establish a casino; the other leads the opposition against it. One is a smooth-talking intellectual; the other is a garrulous, plainspoken minister for a church that condemns homosexuality and abortion.

Politically, Sarris leans to the left. The deal the tribe cut with the Rohnert Park City Council contains progressive elements, such as a unionized casino labor force and environmental mitigations that would normally draw praise from local liberal groups if the proposed development didn’t happen to be a casino.

Worthington is a tough-talking conservative who opposes big government “paternalism” but concedes that Indian sovereignty grants the Graton band the right to a casino. “This paternalism drives me crazy,” Worthington says. “I think this is nothing less than Las Vegas-style paternalism. I think the tribe has a right to a casino, but I just hope they can put it in a place where they can get their economic engine to work without destroying our lifestyle.”

He says he’s currently working on a proposal that will move the proposed casino to an undisclosed location outside Rohnert Park. In the mean time, the campaign to recall Rohnert Park’s city council is underway. He suggests the real answer to the problem of Indian self-reliance is to abolish the Bureau of Indian Affairs and distribute its $3 billion annual budget to the Indians, which by his calculations would amount to $50,000 annually per person.

The reality is that Indian gaming is so far the only method that’s been able to restore Native Americans to some semblance of self-reliance. It’s far from perfect. As Newsweek magazine reported last year, only one in 20 Native Americans receives money from gambling. Many tribes are isolated geographically, and casinos are either out of the question or don’t do enough business to provide meaningful income.

But in California, at least, a reserve trust fund established by Proposition 1A in 2000, the Indian self-reliance initiative overwhelmingly approved by voters, has finally started to pay out increments to the state’s nongaming tribes. The Sycuan tribe in Southern California have dramatically raised their standard of living, and casinos in Northern California such as Cache Creek, owned by the Indians of the Rumsey Rancheria, where the Bole Maru Dreamer Mabel McKay grew up, are doing well enough to provide healthcare and college scholarships to tribal members.

Sitting in the Doubletree lobby, Greg Sarris knows the Graton band’s window of opportunity is closing. Some gaming industry experts predict that within the next 10 years Internet gambling may make Indian casinos obsolete. Time is of the essence. For the past decade, he’s led the fight to restore the tribe’s federal recognition, which was removed by the Rancheria Termination Act in 1958. Recognition was restored in 2000, but many Graton band members are still sore about termination.

“They came in August of 1958,” recalls tribal vice-chair Lorelle Ross. The Termination Act disbanded the rancheria but granted individual Indians the right to own the 16 acres of land as private property. Unfortunately, state and federal agents didn’t mention concepts such as property taxes to the new landowners when they showed up at the rancheria. “Anybody who could was out harvesting, and it was never explained to them.”

As levels of indebtedness increased, tribal members began selling off their property. Ross’ father was one of the last ones to hold out, but eventually debt forced him to sell all but one acre of his land.

“Mom is still the original owner of the property,” Ross says. “But in most cases, they lost everything and you don’t have that generational link to the land.”

When recognition was restored, Sarris said publicly that the tribe wasn’t planning on building a casino. The tribe explored other options, such as organic food processing, a cheese factory, and a winery, Sarris says, “all of which need capital or there is already a glut of here.”

“No bank was going to give us money,” he continues. Enter Station Casinos, which also bankrolled a controversial casino in the Sierra foothills outside Auburn. “Any good economist will tell you we made a prudent decision. As I tell my friends, do the math.”

Doing the math has replaced dreaming for the Federated Indians of the Graton Rancheria. It’s simply a matter of survival. Some of Graton band members still weave baskets, but unlike Mabel McKay, they no longer dream their designs. Such dreams no longer have a place in a culture supposedly founded in part on the doctrine of loving thy neighbor. That this culture can only offer the victims of its genocidal rage the right to build casinos is a sign of not just how much they’ve lost, but how much we’ve all lost.

But Sarris is not ruling out the possibility that they may someday dream again.

“Mabel McKay always said the spirit doesn’t go away and hide under a rock,” he says with a mischievous smile.

With that, he stands up to join the rest of the Graton band to prepare to face the angry citizenry of Rohnert Park.

The tribe get their way that night. The Rohnert Park City Council refuse to rescind the deal, despite a raucous crowd of more than 500 protesters.

But Worthington promises the battle is far from over. “The bottom line for me, why I’m fighting this like a dog, is that I’m not going to give up democracy to these guys,” he says, referring to the Rohnert Park City Council. “For too long, we’ve let these guys ruin our city.”

From the December 4-10, 2003 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.