Talking Pictures

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Talking Pictures

Extreme Normal

‘Eccentric’ author has plenty to say about ‘Schmidt’

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

The Grove–an eccentric little coffee house in the Marina district of San Francisco–is known for its quirky food, its java served in outrageously oversized cups, the hot tea delivered in square-shaped, teakettles made of iron, the big round tables in the center of the room that are just perfect for socializing with total strangers, and the chalkboard menu that, in a note off to the side, invites patrons to borrow from the café’s stash of etch-a-sketches.

“Warren Schmidt wouldn’t understand this restaurant,” observes Jan Friedman, author of the sensation-sparking travel guide Eccentric America (Bradt, 2002, $18.95). Notes Friedman, carrying her steaming, iron coffeepot to a cozy table in the corner, “Schmidt wouldn’t have a clue what this place was about or why it’s so wonderful. Too bad for Schmidt.”

Schmidt is the title character in Alexander Payne’s amazing new film About Schmidt, starring Jack Nicholson as a recently-retired widower from Omaha, Nebraska, who may be the least eccentric person in the whole Central States. In the film–which Friedman and I have just seen at the Presidio Theater, right down the street–Schmidt sets off on an uncharacteristic road trip, driving his RV across Nebraska to attend his daughter’s wedding in Denver, Colorado. It is a truly unremarkable journey, but Schmidt is so unremarkable a man that he sees it all as being adventurous and momentous and slightly overwhelming.

“Schmidt,” I suggest, “is obviously not the adventurous type.”

“The very fact that he was setting out at all was such a huge departure for him,” says Friedman, who knows a thing or two about departures from the norm, having spent two years scouring the 50 states in search of eccentric environments, obsessed people, and odd tourist attractions. A longtime resident of Northern California, Friedman never considered herself to be all that eccentric until she began collecting information for the guidebook, which has sparked such national interest it is now being developed into a television series. “I’m suddenly an obsessive collector of eccentrics,” Friedman laughs. “And I suppose I’m actually becoming an eccentric myself.”

One could say that. All afternoon, Friedman has been scanning the scene for signs of eccentricity. At one point, she pounces on a stray newspaper featuring a story about people who sell religious sex toys.

Whoever those people are, the may end up in the next edition of Eccentric America.

Warren Schmidt, one assumes–were he ever to bump into Friedman along his way–would be nothing short of mystified.

It’s no surprise that he lives in Omaha, a state so lacking in eccentricity–aside, perhaps, from Stonehenge, a replica of Britain’s famous monument, here made entirely of old cars–that Friedman had to search long and hard to much that was strange enough to put in the book. Nebraska, evidently, is very much a Warren Schmidt kind of place.

“For Schmidt,” Frieman says, “that boring little trip from Omaha to Denver, those few days with those trashy people, that was probably the most extreme thing he was ever going to experience.

“And those in-laws were fairly middle-of-the-road eccentrics, as eccentrics go,” she adds. “But they were plenty eccentric, compared to Schmidt. Eccentricity can only be judged in terms of what it is contrasted with. My Uncle from Chicago thought it was incredibly eccentric that we had a hot tub after I moved to California. To him, having a hot tub was an extreme act.”

“Schmidt was less taken aback by Kathy Bates owning a hot tub,” I remark, “than he was by her willingness to strip naked and hop into the tub alongside him.” I’m referring to one of the movie’s more memorable scenes: Kathy Bates, buck naked in a hot tub, coming onto Jack Nicholson’s Schmidt, who is terrified out of his wits.

“To Schmidt, that was as bizarre as if a Martian had landed beside him and taken him in for a physical exam,” Friedman laughs. “Eccentricity is completely relative to what your own experience is.”

According to statistics Friedman quotes in the book, one out of every ten thousand people is a genuine eccentric, with eccentricity being defined as simply “behavior that varies widely from the norm.” While there are eccentrics in all cultures, it’s only in Western cultures, generally, that we feel the freedom to express that eccentricity. “You’re not going to find any guidebooks to Eccentric Saudi Arabia,” Friedman points out. “But that doesn’t mean that one out of every ten thousand Saudis isn’t eccentric. They are–they just don’t express it because of the cultural and societal norms.”

That said, Friedman adds, “Different places spawn different kinds of weirdos. The eccentrics of Southern California are very different from the eccentrics of Northern California, where we take our eccentricities very seriously, as if it’s our civic duty to be eccentric.”

Friedman opens her book to an inside page with a map outlining the number of eccentric manifestations she’s recorded in each state. “You’ll notice that Washington is a lot more eccentric than Oregon–much to my surprise. If your looking at “Eccentric Environments”–things like the Watt’s Towers in California or Totem Pole Park in Oklahoma–then Wisconsin, based statistically on population and area, is actually the most eccentric state in the Union. Who’d have guessed?”

“One thing about Schmidt’s in-laws,” I point out, as a nose-ringed gentlemen in a business suit walks past our table with a glass of milk and an etch-a-sketch, “eccentric or not, trashy or not, those people were a hell of a lot happier than Schmidt was.”

“Eccentrics are essentially happy doing whatever they do,” she replies. “That’s one unusual characteristic of 99 percent of the eccentrics in my book. They don’t need drugs. They are not neurotic. They are not alcoholics or drug abusers. Eccentrics see doctors far less often than non-eccentrics. Being eccentric is good for you.”

“Maybe what Schmidt needed,” I say, “was to become a bit of an eccentric himself.”

“What he needed is antidepressants,” Friedman counters, smiling. “Poor, sad Schmidt could never embrace a truly eccentric lifestyle. He just doesn’t have it in him.”

Web extra to the January 9-15, 2003 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

“The Curatorial Eye: Fifteen Perspectives”

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“The Curatorial Eye: Fifteen Perspectives”


Come In: Dalton Jamieson’s ‘View of Three Rooms and a Mirror’ is included in Julie Baker’s ‘Views’ show.

Fifteen to One

SMOVA exhibit raises the stakes and the odds

By Gretchen Giles

Visiting 15 art exhibits sounds like a worthy resolution for a full New Year, involving all the ordinary hazards of remembering to attend the opening reception, driving there and parking, fighting through the crowd for a small piece of cheese, and then elbowing back again to stand on tippy-toes to possibly see what little you can of the art on the walls. And then, of course, doing all of that 14 more times before year’s end. Perhaps this is a worthy resolution for more than one New Year at a time.

Which is why the Sonoma Museum of Visual Art is so marvelously helpful in bringing 15 mini exhibitions together all at once, putting the work on view for months, and then having a big old party at the end, after all interested have had a good, long chance to belly right up to the walls.

For “The Curatorial Eye: Fifteen Perspectives,” SMOVA’s sixth annual fundraiser and auction, SMOVA executive director Gay Dawson has invited 15 guest curators, including herself, to stage mini exhibitions of 10 pieces each, totaling work by 150 different artists. The results promise to be more complex than just a simple math equation.

Much larger in scale, scope, and financial ambitions than previous years’ auctions, “The Curatorial Eye,” which runs from Jan. 12 to March 7, with the auction planned for March 8, aims to raise $100,000 for the museum. According to Dawson, they raised some $40,000 last year.

Well, that is a simple math equation. From whence the extra $60,000? She chuckles gamely. “We’re still going to deliver a museum-quality show, but to the usual silent art auction, we’re adding a live auction.” Those, for example, who could use a mint condition 1967 Volkswagen in which to carry their art home are well advised to grab a paddle when LBC executive director David Fischer begins the live auction, as this is one of the main prizes of the night.

But the art remains the story. Dawson’s contribution is titled “Spring Grass.” “It’s a mini show about rejuvenation in the same way that things die back in the winter,” she says, noting with a laugh that the phrase is also a reference in Japanese art to pubic hair. “But,” she hastens, “the way that I’m using it is with renewal.

“The works in my show are all subtle and about finding life again, finding life in something dead, coming to life, or a peaceful rejuvenation,” Dawson continues. “It was a spontaneous idea; it occurred to me in a flash of insight. There’s something about a mini show–you can be a little zany. Maybe it’s a topic that I wouldn’t have the occasion to do in a larger show.”

(The notion of a zany larger show examining pubic hair in Japanese art goes amazingly unbroached.)

Two artists who recently had residencies at the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts–Bill Ivey and Christiane Löhr–are among Dawson’s picks, both of whom work intensely with objects from the natural world. Löhr is involved with the compelling geometry of nature; Ivey, Dawson says, “works a lot with the idea of dead/alive. [His contribution] is a redwood sprout encased in cement.”

How will we know that it’s in there?

“Some of the artists are not particularly ironic,” she assures drily. “They’re pretty straightforward.”

Known for his obsessive pen-and-ink drawings of boiling viral structures, Sonoma State University art instructor David D’Andrade examines the less linear forces of fear and complacency in his curatorial contribution of the same name. His list of artists is a familiar string of best beloveds, including San Francisco painter Amy Wilson–whose compulsively girly canvases were on show last May at SMOVA–and emerging painter and printmaker Frank Ryan, whose work enjoyed an unseemly rave-about in these pages just last October. But why the theme?

“Fear and complacency are what’s going on right now with impending war and fear of terrorism,” D’Andrade says. “It’s been on my mind–I’m sure that others are thinking the same thing–and I wonder how it affects the production of art. Has it,” he asks rhetorically, “changed people’s work?” D’Andrade somewhat sheepishly admits that it hasn’t much affected his own. “I’ve been working with this virus thing for a while,” he says. “I like the anxious theme, and there’s a certain amount of beauty to it–it can look both floral and alien at the same time.”

Other, possibly calmer, exhibits in part include Dominic Egan’s “Take One or Take All,” a photographic exhibit based, naturally enough, on the Ten Commandments; Santa Rosa artist Al Longo’s gender inquiry titled “It’s a Guy Thing”; SSU Art Gallery exhibition coordinator Carla Stone’s salute to the work of faculty, BFA candidates, and alumni; Marian Parmenter’s short sample of those who exhibit with the SFMOMA’s rental gallery; and Lydia Welch’s all-fiber exhibition, “Surfaces/Textiles.” Julie Baker’s “Views” confronts how we edit the world around us; Jonathan Gregory takes on the untutored with “Outsider Art”; and Mary Hull Webster muses on “Interiors.”

And then there are the artists gathered in the San Francisco-based collective known simply as VERN, who introduce “VERNland” to the North Bay with “The Curatorial Eye.” VERN curator and member Chris Natrop explains that the moniker was jocularly used among the seven core artists to address each other, as with the simple elegance of that salutary phrase, “Hi, Vern.” They decided to call themselves this collectively when they realized its placeholder in the French term vernissage, which means a private preview screening of an exhibition.

Ranging in age from 32 to 51, the artists of VERN formed just a year ago as a reaction to the dire toughness of making a mark all alone in the modern art world. Pooling resources, abilities, and contacts, VERN has, since its inception, shown in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Genoa, and Chicago, with exhibits slated this year for Romania and Berlin, and more shows in New York and Italy.

“It’s been really accelerated for us,” Natrop admits. “It’s the energy of the collective.” Having a solid professional background in design and marketing doesn’t hurt much either (Natrop joking that he “resigned” from the design department of Wells Fargo bank last year). Nor does it hurt to have a VERN-ite who owns San Francisco’s Melting Point Gallery, as does member Tyrome Tripoli. But those extra niceties aside, it’s VERN’s work that keeps making the point.

Utilizing paint, sculpture, found objects, paper scraps, and video, VERN sets itself the challenge of doing nothing but landscapes for this show. But Natrop describes it as “definitely pushing the limits of landscape. One guy created a blue color field painting just called Sky. Another guy did a sculpture called Rubber Highway that is a large rubber belt bolted together to make a floppy highway. I’m really excited by the result, because it shows all the different ways that landscapes can be represented.”

The pressing question of course becomes what the seven to 10 highly creative members of VERN choose to fight about.

“Oh, you know,” Natrop laughs, “what kind of wine to have at the reception, should we put a tip jar out on the table.”

More seriously, he says, “There’s always going to be tension when you’re working in a group. In the beginning, it was really hard to figure out how to curate our shows, because everyone as individuals wanted to show everything that they loved. Now we have a director for every show, who acts as a curator and organizer. We have a lot to offer, and we all put feelers out. At the end of the day, it’s really about the art.

“One philosophy that I have is that there are a lot of really good artists in the world, but there’s a lack of opportunity. Knowing that our art is good, we’re trying to create the opportunity.”

And so is the SMOVA.

‘The Curatorial Eye: Fifteen Perspectives’ shows Jan. 12-March 7, with a silent and live art auction slated for Saturday, March 8, 6-9pm, at the LBC, 50 Mark West Springs Road, Santa Rosa. Museum hours are Wednesday-Saturday, 10am-4pm; Sunday, 1-4pm. Regular admission is $2; free to members and children under 16. Auction admission is $45. 707.527.0297.

From the January 9-15, 2003 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Declutter, I Declare

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Declutter, I Declare


Declutter, I Declare

Finding peace and harmony amidst all of life’s junk

By Gretchen Giles

We’re gathered here today to talk about the stuff that piles up. The piles that stuff up. The downs of stuff piled. We’re in a Marin County hotel conference room to learn how to shed old books, desnarl forgotten knitting projects, cast off broken car parts, discard rusty tools, and remove the odd hairbrush.

We’ve come together to fervently discuss the spiritual aspects of last week’s newspapers and all of those unanswered e-mails, unopened bills, shoeboxes full of photos, and unread magazines. We will confess to jumbled closets, we’ll yearn toward clean surfaces, we’ll speak of old clothes.

Over the span of two and a half days, we will tremble at geopathic stress, reek of etheric energy, aim toward our astral selves, form a conga line of mass massage, clap at walls, and learn to dowse. There will be saucers full of flowers, there will be incense instruction, endless bells will be rung, and all major credit cards will be accepted.

We seekers have come from Hawaii, from Texas, from Canada and Manhattan and Rhode Island, and from all over California. We are gathered in the pink plushness of the Sausalito Room in Marin’s Embassy Suites hotel to listen to the queen of clutter, Karen Kingston, explain the dire soul-implications of our messy, messy lives. We have paid her lots of tidy money to do this, and we will spend large, amorphous quantities more of it before the weekend is over.

Brining the Ugly Olive

The clutter- and space-clearing workshop led by Kingston begins on a Friday night, and I clip past the hotel’s fake waterfall steaming with chlorine, and wander lost through the bar, where people who presumably have perfectly ordered drawers idly sit before luscious-looking cold cocktails. As it’s been a work day, I am ordinarily attired all in black, a color I am soon to learn attracts malignant energies and may even direct evil spirits right at me with an invisible gotcha snap.

When I finally find the Sausalito Room, some 80 people, exactly four of them male, chat amiably and fix themselves herbal tea while whiny nonmusic drones on in the background. There are no luscious-looking cold cocktails anywhere, nor will there be any caffeine, steaks, or white sugar in evidence until I go to find them myself on Sunday night.

I am the only one dressed in all black, an ugly olive in a grove of life-affirming pastels. By evening’s end, I will be convinced that every evil energy ever conceived in the Sausalito Room is firmly attached to my hem. I take a chair in the back and look around.

This gathering is mostly white, mostly moneyed wives who don’t look like the types to nod earnestly and take notes on chi, evil spirits, and etheric debris. It’s a pantyhose affair, rather than a naked-under-my-batik type of gathering. We look like attendees at a real estate seminar, and, indeed, more than a few workshoppers here are realtors hoping to pick up tips. Others are professional organizers who specialize in helping to unknit other people’s snarls, some hope to study with Kingston, and some appear to lap up weekend workshops like others enjoy weekend hikes. The rest, like me, are just plain disorganized.

A couple confers beside me. “Come up to the front of the room,” the woman coaxes, “and sit with me.”

“I’m just fine here,” the man replies evenly. “Please,” she wheedles. “No,” he says, sounding irritated. “I’m. Just. Fine. Here.”

“Be that way,” she snaps, “I’m sitting up front so I don’t miss anything.” She moves to her seat.

Having stayed his spot, the man says loudly to himself, “Well, you won’t be missed.”

And so we settle down for a pleasant weekend of spiritual instruction on how to clean up all the little messes in our lives.

Sacred Sound Bites

We of the Sausalito Room have come to learn two wisdoms: the art of creating sacred space and the art of clearing clutter. One is pure folk smarts; the other is equal parts human instinct, common sense, lite psychology, and hooey.

We start with the hooey.

Kingston is a handsome, business-like middle-aged Englishwoman. She begins to explain the concept of the etheric. “The etheric is the energy body–what the Chinese call chi, what the Hindus call prana–that runs along our body’s meridians,” she instructs. “It permeates right through us, and we’re exchanging etheric energies all the time, so you may as well get good at it!”

Ugh. I shudder indelicately and look around, imagining that everyone is off-gassing energy like ghostly flatulence and that mine own–the only one that smells good–is rapidly being absorbed and trumped by someone else’s. Color plays an important part in etheric exchange, Kingston explains, which is why light, positive colors emit better than does the death-magnet void of black.

Most importantly, etheric energies can be trapped inside homes, which is why we’re certain to find that if our new home’s previous tenants argued, we will too. If they were fat, you may as well trade up your own waistband. If they were sick, better make certain that your insurance is paid current. No previous homeowners, it seems, are ever happy and successful, making an excellent conscious living while raising lovely children and keeping alive a vibrant, sexy relationship in a glow of perfect health.

I suddenly tune into the “frequency”: Unless you rid your living space of these stale etherics left behind like a gazillion sloughed, dead skin cells from the wretched bodies of the former residents, you’re essentially damned to live their lives over again.

OK, says Kingston, rubbing her hands. Who’s ready for a break?

I am!

Tea for Gandhi

Waiting for tea, careful to keep my etheric energies full and positive but moving directly back toward me where they belong, I stand with quiet patience for the woman ahead of me in line. She’s still registering for the workshop and is trying to settle the final details with one of Kingston’s assistants. I am at peace. I am in no hurry. I am, in fact, deciding in a gentle yet mild and loving way whether I should have the orange spice or the raspberry twig tea.

“Do you mind?” she says to me with a sudden savageness. “It’s perfectly all right to go around me. You needn’t just stand there like that and wait.” I assure her in a voice like Gandhi’s that I don’t mind, but she jerks her head viciously over her shoulder in the direction I am to move along to.

It’s the black, I know it. She’s sensed something from my etherics that’s poisonous and bad, and it’s infected her, making her the madwoman of the tea line! I look back at her and she’s chatting pleasantly with another student, showing teeth and gums in a facsimile of smile. I look in vain for the whiskey tea but must console myself with orange spice. I move my chair further to the back.

Making Space for Kingston

Karen Kingston lives half of each year in the United Kingdom, and the other half in Bali, where she and her husband run a profitable ecotourist hotel based on her own particular brand of feng shui methods. The author of two books, Creating Sacred Space with Feng Shui and Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui (Broadway Books), Kingston is a thriving one-woman cottage industry who is as equally clamored for in Austin, Texas, as she is in Stockholm, Sweden.

She tours part of each year giving these workshops; she trains practitioners in her methods; she hosts paying guests at her hotel; and she provides clutter-clearing sacred-space seekers with a chance to purchase her special bells ($130-$200), “Harmony” balls and bags ($4-$50), and altar cloths and “colorizers” for sacred table settings ($17.50-$150). Needless to say, she was completely uncluttered by such items at the workshop’s close.

Something of a savant as a child, Kingston says that she could read, write, and type by age four. By age 11, she had exhausted the contents of her village library, so naturally enough spent her adolescence sulking and smoking.

At 22 she realized she had uncanny talents and could enter anyone’s home and, by feeling through her hands the energy that the walls emitted, tell the stories that had unwound within each structure. Not surprisingly, many of those stories aren’t happy ones, and Kingston began her crusade to clear bad energies through homespun sacred acts and the dissolution of clutter.

Kingston is both warm and scary, as we learned through hearing of her marital arrangements, a story offered as a perfect example of the power of clutter clearing. When she decided that she would like to be married, Kingston also thought that the groom-elect should be Balinese. Living at the time in London, she called the Balinese embassy to inquire how many single Balinese men then resided in the United Kingdom. There were six. She phoned them all, only to discover that they were each already affianced.

Undaunted and preparing to return to Bali, she cleaned out half of her closet and one full dresser drawer in preparation for the belongings of her ghost-groom, whoever he might turn out to be. Once back on the island, she interviewed men for half a year before deciding upon the one who did become her husband. When he accompanied her to London, she says that he was initially shocked but eventually gratified to discover that she’d already made space in her life for him.

Scary like that.

Clear It Out

Ridding one’s home of ugly etherics is no small task, but it’s essential to getting down to the dirty basics of ridding one’s home of ugly clutter. It should not, counsels Kingston, be undertaken if one is menstruating, pregnant, nursing a baby, suffering from eczema, has ingested marijuana in recent months, or has an open wound of any kind. Don’t tempt this on the wild mojo of a full moon.

You may also not perform this on behalf of someone else if he or she either does not agree with such methods or is unaware of them. Dark nasty things are sure to result. Kingston relates the tale of one hospital-bound woman who simply died upon reentering her space-cleared home. She didn’t recognize it. Her built-up etherics were gone, and in mourning, she keeled. Not at all good for the conscience.

One must be in the best possible health and spirit, be preferably unattended, should have the pets stashed outside, and be standing in a clean house or apartment before space clearing. One should not (it now need not even be said) be wearing black.

An altar needs to be erected in each room, featuring a floral or fruit offering, leaves, candles, and incense. The walls have to be swept down–like a human windshield wiper–with one’s arms to release the old energy. Right-angled corners should be “clapped out,” which necessitates an educated adult standing facing a corner and clapping from the ceiling to floor in a rhythmic manner (see “preferably unattended,” above). Bad etherics evidently hate this and flee.

Working in a systematic manner, each room should be cleansed through wiping, clapping, burning, and altaring. Then bells are rung through each to entreat good spirits in, and the final house is “shrink-wrapped” as a visualization in one’s mind, as though an enormous roll of psychic Saran were available to seal in all the good juices one has just evoked. Repeat once monthly or as needed.

The Sacred Skillet

I waver between incredulity and belief. After all, didn’t I once solemnly walk a fiery skillet burning with lavender, sage, and whatever fragrant weeds I could pull from the garden through a house I’d just moved into in order to get rid of the presence of the former resident? I did.

I had performed these rituals with no knowledge of feng shui or space clearing; they had just seemed like natural rites to enact. I could feel the ick of these interlopers and tenants and didn’t want to live with–well, damn–with their etherics.

But Los Angeles-based feng shui consultant Cate Bramble is having none of it. Traditionally trained in Chinese feng shui methodology–which aims to correct people’s relationships to their environments–Bramble maintains the Feng Shui Ultimate Resource website (www.qi-whiz.com), devoted to debunking what she calls the practice’s “snake-oil-and-incense image.”

The author of numerous articles and the forthcoming Architect’s Guide to Feng Shui, Bramble says, “I’m really not sure where space clearing came from. It’s not a part of traditional feng shui. It seems to have some antecedents in smudging, which is Native American, but it’s really just a hodgepodge of New Age crap.”

Stressing that feng shui is an “ethnoscience,” as it stems from the traditional ceremonies of indigenous peoples, Bramble has no patience with ringing bells or lighting incense or making flower offerings or shrink-wrapping the house. Feng shui, she insists, involves a compass and a calculator.

“Traditional feng shui is not as sexy,” Bramble says. “It’s from cultures we don’t know and understand. It’s from science, there’s math, there’s having to do things a certain way. Oh my God, there’s a lot of hard work involved. These are all things that Americans don’t want to hear about.”

But what about the assertion that one can feel the energies of a home emanating from the walls? “That’s a bovine by-product,” Bramble quips. “Call [a space clearer] out someplace where you know the history of the house, and ask her to read it–she won’t get it right. It’s the typical con game of fortunetellers and the like, who use clues that you give them to tell you what you want to hear. We are actually giving them permission to fool us.”

Back at the workshop, we all stand and give shoulder massages to people on either side of us. I’m in an agony of embarrassed etherics. We’re instructed to bring pillows the next day and are dismissed.

Ingest, Consume, Eliminate

Saturday dawns, and I dress in pinks and purples, an oversized flower and her pillow floating down the hall to the Sausalito Room. It’s a new crowd today–larger, avid for clutter counseling–and many hapless souls are unknowingly dressed in black. I simper unpleasantly at them and find a seat. I’m careful to choose a different spot from yesterday, due to the possible geopathic stresses that we have learned might be leaking up from the hotel’s floor–nay, any floor!–and which can make us all terribly sick through repeated exposure.

Acolytes anchored, Kingston takes her place. “I have compassion about clutter,” she says, “but I don’t truck in any nonsense about it.” Stipulating that a mess on the outside connotes a mess on the inside, she launches into a day of nuts-and-bolts instruction on stripping down the many dusty reaches of one’s existence.

Simply put, Kingston defines clutter as anything that you don’t both use and love, period. If it doesn’t lift your spirits, provide utile assistance, or simply make you happy, it’s dump fodder. Kingston asserts that by surrounding yourself with unloved and unuseful items, you inadvertently disallow glorious new things to come into your life. You don’t leave yourself room to change and grow. You remain the person you were when you first acquired an object that is now meaningless to you. What’s more, stagnant energies collect around such objects, adding to the psychic weight of the stuff.

Feeling depressed? Look around you. Depressed people tend to leave a lot of stuff all over the floor, and that stuff is just adding to your dis-ease. At least move your piles to higher ground. Clothes? If you haven’t worn an item in a year, it’s clutter. Recycle, gift, or throw it away.

Books? Donate them to a library so that you can borrow them back if you need to. Mail? Open it by a wastebasket and buy a larger one if it fills too quickly. Separate your mail into low, medium, and high priorities. Deal with the high first. If after two weeks your medium or low priority mail has remained unattended, toss it. Creditors tend to get in touch again.

Using the body’s processes as a metaphor, Kingston says, “We eat, we digest, we excrete. When it comes to clutter, people think that they can acquire, use, and keep it. Imagine if you did this with food! You’d explode within a month.” To that end, she also recommends regular herbal colon cleansings.

By all means, she assures, keep a junk drawer; in fact, you can keep several as long as you regularly comb through and discard some of the junk. That knickknack that prevents the mantel from being a paean to the horizontal line may also be kept, as long as it passes the use/love law. Clutter clearing is not an indiscriminate toss of all that you own; it’s about having enough stuff to do what you need to do.

Aye, but once you’ve attained this balance, there’s the rub: Nothing new may come in unless something old goes out. Eat, digest, excrete. Ow.

It’s pillow time. We’re to lie on the floor in an attempt to connect with our higher, astral selves, that part of us unclouded by clutter. Some of us, we are told, will fall asleep. If a neighbor is snoring, please gently shake her awake.

That’s it. I sneak out.

Caught by De-Clutter

Again, Cate Bramble remains unimpressed. On her website, she reviews Kingston’s two books. Of Clear Your Clutter, she writes that it’s “the Puritan obsession with cleanliness married to pop psychology to explain how we run our lives and exhibit emotions through our clutter–how it keeps us chained to the past and fosters disharmony–which links with our sense of identity, status, security, and territoriality. Not a shred of scientific evidence to back it up, and the author actually owes her theories to Calvinist theology. Well, except for the stuff about enemas. There she’s on her own.”

But I’m hooked–except, too, maybe the enema part. I go home and give a cold eye to the house. I can’t bring myself to engage in the hocus of space-clearing it, but I can certainly declutter it. There are the I-hate-my-mom-I-hate-my-elbows-I-hate-my-knees diaries from high school. Out they go. Here is the dress that I wore to a friend’s wedding eight years ago and haven’t donned since. In the Goodwill pile.

There are the 15 photographs of the same baby playing in the same sand on the same day. I save the best one and toss the rest. Gifts I’ve been too polite to discard now seem to be steaming with regret and go quickly out the door. Candle ends, coaster sets, ugly plates, unfinished craft projects, and those two “extra” can openers–gone.

I’d like to boast that since my tenure in the Sausalito Room and its resulting cleaning frenzy, I’ve lived a clear, strict life–a veritable consommé–of use and love. Of course I haven’t. There are several new piles of indiscriminate origin scattered about, and there was that meltdown in Ikea resulting in three new chairs coming in and not one single old one going out. I’m even back in black, spitting a bold raspberry to evil etherics everywhere.

But it has prompted an ongoing interior conversation about what clutter might consist of. Is it people? Sometimes. Is it our schedules, with children and adults passing in and out of car doors all day long in no discernible pattern except that of constant, moving chaos? Just maybe. Was it those diaries, clothes, candle stubs, and can openers? Most definitely.

But is it the full collection of every book I’ve read since 1982, the piles of CDs I might still want to hear on some unforeseen day, or that vintage red silk dress that requires a diet of fruits and seeds for reentry? Absolutely not. As a mere mortal, I’ll pit pure love over use any day–which of course is why Karen Kingston and her space-clearing workshops will continue to fill hotel conference rooms.

From the January 9-15, 2003 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Doug Jayne

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Soul Searching: Doug Jayne pays homage to the Beatles’ ‘Rubber Soul.’

With a Little Help

Doug Jayne gets by quite well

By Karl Byrn

The first kick you’ll get from Doug Jayne’s solo disc, It Looks Like She’s Going on a Trip, is the cover. It’s designed as a perfect copy of the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, from the front’s evergreen background and psychedelic distortion, right down to the exact cropping and positioning of family photos inside.

But the real pleasure is the disc itself: a robust, easy-going stew of original blues shuffles, country-folk reflections, rock workouts, and jazz, bluegrass, and Tex-Mex nuances that features a notable array of local talent.

The Rubber Soul cover, Jayne says, is his tribute to “where I came from. . . . My brother and I listened to that album on our dad’s stereo the day it was released. I was 10, and it was my first serious musical jaw-drop. If that moment didn’t happen, I could be asking, ‘You wanna super-size that?’ instead of working in the music business.”

Thanks to that “musical jaw-drop,” Jayne did end up as a luminary in the Sonoma County music scene. He’s co-owner of the Last Record Store, host of KRCB radio’s Connections on Wednesday nights, and head of Jackalope Records (on which he plans to release a “Live from the Powerhouse” series of discs to benefit KRCB).

Jayne also plays in various local bands, so naturally his bandmates helped flesh out his solo disc. Bassist Dean Wilson and reed man Ari Camarota play with Jayne in Stupid White People. Bassist (and cover designer) Robert Malta plays with Jayne in Loser Friendly. His current band, Laughing Gravy, lent the skills of dobro, banjo, and mandolin player Kevin Russell (whose own solo disc, You Don’t Know Me, was recently released on Jackalope), accordion player and keyboardist Ron Stinnett (also of the Ruminators), and vocalists Allegra Broughton and Sam Page (also of Solid Air).

Jayne is particularly pleased with some contributions from new players: drummer Gary Silva, who plays with Norton Buffalo and Elvin Bishop, and vocalists Jackie Payne and Gail Muldrow, from Johnny Otis’ band.

Charlie Musselwhite brings the project world-class name recognition, blowing harmonica on the humorous “Leafblower Blues” and self-explanatory “Is this the Blues.” Jayne notes with a fan’s enthusiasm that “over the years, [Musselwhite] has mastered how to use his brilliant harp playing like a master chef uses spices. The stuff he does with Tom Waits and the Blind Boys of Alabama is awesome. I’m thrilled to have him play with me!”

Co-producer Harry Gale also anchors the disc with crisp and tasteful guitar leads. He’s twangy on the title track, biting on the blues cuts, and almost echoes Mark Knopfler on the rockers.

Of course, the disc’s center is Jayne. He sings in a steady yet somewhat melancholy-soaked tenor that vaguely recalls Warren Zevon or Dave Alvin. And while the Americana-kitchen-sink of styles suggests the diversity of Taj Mahal, Jayne’s lyrics create a single vision in which somber and sad themes must be handled with humor. On the pedal-steel caressed “Lonesome State,” cheesy B-movies are the solace for lost love. On “Running Lightly Down the Road,” a man notices his lover’s “chubby little rear” as she runs from their burning house.

The disc moves from a first half of girl-leaves-guy quandaries (“I realized after the fact that I had created sort of a mini concept album of break-up songs,” Jayne says) to a second half tackling big-picture universals. “Nothing in this Life Stays Long” is an imagistic, dreamlike piece of desperation written when Jayne’s mother died. “Just Like Home” draws resigned wisdom from an afternoon Jayne spent with his two sons skipping stones on the Russian River.

“Safety of Our Cars” closes the disc with casual social commentary (“We feel safe with that metal all around us / as if four wheels could make our lives less bizarre”). Its small dig at the president–written when Bush Sr. was in office–is still timely. “I had no interest in updating or rewriting it to address the [cell-phone driver rudeness] thing of the new millennium,” he notes.

So what’s next? “I’m going to try to break mine and Kevin’s discs on a national level,” Jayne says. “It’s tough to be a ‘local artist’!” Thanks to Rubber Soul, and with a little help from his friends, Jayne is much more.

It Looks Like She’s Going on a Trip is available at the Last Record Store, 739 Fourth St., Santa Rosa. 707.525.1963.

From the January 9-15, 2003 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

A Slick Solution

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A Slick Solution


Photograph by William Wrentmore

Homegrown Alternatives: Setting up to convert vegetable oil into biodiesel just takes a trip to the hardware store.

A Slick Solution

Local co-ops use food to power vehicles

By Sara Bir

The oil embargoes of the 1970s–with their inflated gas prices and endless lines at the pump–are a time nobody wants to revisit. But now, with SUVs crowding the highways, Venezuela temporarily cut off as a source of crude oil, and the Bush administration galvanizing a very bleak situation with Iraq, it looks like we may be reliving some unsavory bits of “me decade” nostalgia very soon. A fledgling co-op in Sonoma County isn’t sweating it, though. The fuel for their cars is 100 percent domestic, 100 percent organic, and nearly 100 percent vegetable oil.

It’s called the Cold Pressed Fuel Cooperative, and its members are part of an alternative fuel movement that’s gaining momentum across the globe. Founding member Gary Liess proudly bears a sign on his sporty red Mercedes that says, ‘Run by Vegetable Oil.’ “We’re probably one of the first co-ops in the country to get together and formalize a model,” Liess says.

Liess, a financial planner who lives in Santa Rosa, insists he’s “not a car guy”; to him, the car he drives is just a way to get from one place to another. The fact is, any vehicle with a diesel engine can run on biodiesel with no adjustments, and many vehicles can, with some simple alterations, run on straight vegetable oil (SVO).

“This is not new news,” says Liess. “This is 100-year-old technology, and we’re just now coming back to it. Rudolf Diesel designed this engine to run on vegetable oil. He did a demonstration at the 1900 World’s Fair where he ran his engine on peanut oil. The engine is not a bad engine; it’s the fuel that’s put into the engine.”

The six-month-old co-op presently obtains its oil from Spectrum Naturals in Petaluma, a company that makes organic oils. Whenever Spectrum switches from bottling one oil, such as olive, to another–say, flaxseed–they have to clean out the lines in the tanks; Spectrum produces about 1,500 gallons a month of waste oil.

Normally, they’d have to pay a company to come and dispose of it. When a nonprofit co-op picks up the oil and uses it for fuel, Spectrum benefits doubly by getting tax write-offs. Any type of vegetable oil can be used to fuel a car, though some are better than others.

“If you look at it from an economic standpoint, we’re running on free fuel,” says Liess. “And we’re not polluting nearly as much as everything else out there. It’s pretty much win-win.”

Cars can use vegetable oil as their primary fuel, but the vegetable oil itself is too thick to ignite the engine. For ignition purposes, either standard diesel or biodiesel oil can be used. Biodiesel itself is nothing more than vegetable oil that’s been chemically altered with lye and either ethanol or methanol.

Yokayo Biofuels, a company in Ukiah, will deliver biodiesel to your house, but it can be made at home through an amazingly low-tech process. (It’s also much cheaper that way. Biodiesel runs about $2 a gallon but costs 60 cents a gallon to make. Another new co-op, affiliated with the Cold Pressed Fuel Cooperatives and as of yet unnamed, gets together to make their own biodiesel.)

Meanwhile, converting a diesel engine to run on vegetable oil isn’t as daunting as it sounds. Conversion kits run anywhere from $200 to $800. Add installation on top of that, and it’s possible to own an SVO-run vehicle for a few thousand dollars.

Liess stresses that alternative fuels are only temporary solutions, but he notes that their emissions are more environmentally friendly than petroleum-based fuels in any case. “There’s really no negative with this as of yet.

“I haven’t gone to a gas station in nine months,” Liess says with a gleam of joy in his eye. “This is something that anybody can do. You can do it right now, it’s simple.”

For more information about the Cold Pressed Fuels Cooperative, go to www.veggieavenger.com.

From the January 9-15, 2003 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Chestnuts

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Chestnuts


Worth the Effort: Chestnuts’ hard shells reveal delicious, flavorful meat.

Treasure Chest

Winter is the time to rediscover chestnuts

By Sara Bir

Supposedly, dreaming of splitting or opening a chestnut indicates you will solve a mystery or a problem that has been plaguing you. This makes sense–cracking the nut and all–but who really dreams about chestnuts anymore? The closest most Americas–who, per capita, eat approximately one nut per person per year–get to chestnuts is when singing the opening line of “The Christmas Song.”

OK, hands up here: How many of us have had a chestnut roasted on an open fire? Hmm. How about a roasted chestnut, period? It sounds like an archaic thing to do, a pastime that long ago went the way of churning our own butter or starting a fire by rubbing two sticks together.

We’re shortchanging ourselves by relegating the chestnut to cozy holiday nostalgia and maybe a guest-starring role in a stuffing or two. Chestnuts are blissfully versatile, easily grown and harvested, and much more compelling in taste than you would ever suspect. In the mouth, they crumble with a slowly dissolving chalky richness, warm and mysterious and ancient. Chestnuts date back to prehistoric times, and there’s still something unplaceable and vital in eating them, knowing that their misshapen nutmeats sustained the marches of Roman armies and quelled the hunger biting at peasants’ stomachs.

For centuries chestnuts were a major staple for multiple cultures. The rural mountainous region of Southern Europe, in the Italian and Swiss Alps, was for several hundred years called the “Chestnut Civilization.” In Roman times, the chestnut was the basis of a vital economy in the Mediterranean basin. In areas where other crops refused to grow, the chestnut crop provided a dependable source of sustenance throughout the winter.

Because of its starchy composition (twice that of potatoes), the chestnut was referred to as the “bread tree.” Dried chestnuts can be milled into flour, and the nuts themselves are treated as potatoes in dishes of Europe, Asia, and Africa.

Native Americans too looked to chestnuts as a dietary staple. Up until a mere century ago, Native American chestnut trees were so prolific along the eastern United States that it was said a squirrel could travel from New York to Georgia without ever touching the ground.

After the colonization of America, chestnut trees provided settlers with high-quality lumber, as well as tannins used in leather processing. People cured hams made from pigs fattened with chestnuts, and tons of nuts were packed and shipped by train to large cities for street vendors to roast during the holidays.

In 1904 a grove of Asian chestnut trees was planted on Long Island. The trees carried a lethal fungus which the native chestnut trees had no resistance to, and over the next 50 years what was called the chestnut blight wiped out nearly the entire American chestnut population.

The majority of the chestnut trees currently found in the United States are of native European stock, and we are way down there in terms of global production. Today the world’s top chestnut producers are China, Turkey, Korea, Italy, and Japan. Sebastopol’s Green Valley Chestnut Ranch’s 4,000-pound harvest this season is already long sold-out through mail orders placed on the Internet.

The most simple and immediate way to become acquainted with chestnuts is to eat a few, roasted and straight from the skin. As far as late-night snacking goes, a peeled, hot chestnut is a much more sensual experience than, say, the cloyingly accessible caramel goop of a pint of Ben & Jerry’s.

Coerced out of its leathery peel, a chestnut’s flesh emerges wrinkled and naked as a newborn, each with its own unique network of ridges and folds. When one slips out of its shell whole and unblemished, it is a fleeting and perfect thrill.

Raw chestnuts are virtually impossible to peel–which is just as well, because raw chestnuts are also virtually impossible to eat, thanks to a high level of tannic acid that would prompt a mighty tummy ache. They must be cooked first. In an exciting and dangerous touch, chestnuts will explode (!) during cooking if their tough outer skin is not punctured. There are specialized knives with short, curved, beaklike blades made just for this purpose, though any sharp paring knife will do just as well. Lightly make incisions in an X pattern on the flat side of the nut, trying to avoid cutting into the flesh of the nut itself.

To roast chestnuts over a fire, place the scored nuts in a foil pie tin punched with holes, sprinkle with water, and place directly on hot coals. Shake a few times during the roasting to prevent charring. When a fire is not roaring and ready for nuts, any oven will work. Roast the nuts at 375 degrees for 20 minutes or so, until the scored corners of the skin curl back, and peel while still hot.

To boil, place the scored nuts in a saucepan and cover with cold water. Bring to a boil and simmer for 15 to 25 minutes, then peel. (This method is best suited for chestnuts destined for a purée, since the nutmeats tend to fall apart when simmered.) A food mill or ricer is the best way to purée chestnuts; since their level of starch is so high, chestnuts can become gluey when mangled in a food processor.

As chestnuts are not the most popular item in the produce aisle, it can be challenging to locate fresh ones. Look for chestnuts that are dark brown and shiny–dull skin may be a sign of mold–with no surface blemishes or pinholes (which indicate worms). The nuts should feel firm and compact, with no air pockets between the skin and the flesh.

Because of their high water content, the nuts can spoil quickly and should be stored in the refrigerator in a paper bag until used. When fresh chestnuts are not available, look for canned or frozen nuts, which are already peeled and thus more convenient–though if half the fun of the nut is getting to the meat, what’s the point?

Very low in fat and high in starch and water content, chestnuts are an anomaly among nuts and can be treated as either a starch or a vegetable in both sweet and savory dishes. Because of their mealy-smooth texture and mild sweetness, chestnuts are as equally at home in savory preparations as in desserts. Puréed chestnuts can be incorporated into soups, mashed potatoes, sauces, and pastry creams. Whole chestnuts enliven salads, cabbage, and rice dishes.

Here in the States, chestnuts are typically spotted as additions to stuffing. A recipe: make your favorite traditional-type dressing (traditional as in not zucchini bread with avocado and dried fish), and add a handful of chopped, roasted chestnuts. The end.

Italians in particular continue to embrace the chestnut, making specialties such as fresh pasta with chestnut flour (stracci di castagne) and chestnut polenta. In Corsica, France, the Pietra Brewery even brews an amber beer with chestnut flour, yielding a strong yet delicate beer with minimal bitterness.

Chestnuts compose the bulk of a dessert beloved on the Italian and French side of the Alps. Montebianco (the Italian version) and Mont Blanc (the French) consist of a sweetened chestnut purée piled into a crest and then capped generously with swirls of whipped cream, creating a smaller version of Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps. Basically, the dessert is a very whimsical freeform pile of stuff. Sometimes it’s decorated with tiny paper skiers.

Even though we Americans have an affinity for instant-pudding-and Cool-Whip-based confections with names like Dirt Pudding, it’s tough to imagine Mont Blanc seizing our country by storm. Maybe we could sell molds of presidents’ faces especially for this purpose and rename it Mount Rushmore.

John Evelyn, a 17th-century gardener and diarist, wrote that chestnuts are “delicacies for princes and a lusty and masculine food for rusticks.” Lusty, masculine, a delicacy for princes, and yet the bread of the peasants! The chestnut season is still at hand, and plenty of time remains to rediscover one of the great, forgotten lusty foods.

Cabbage with Chestnuts

Try this with pork or roasted chicken.
12 peeled, roasted chestnuts
1 small onion, thinly sliced
1 small Granny Smith apple, peeled and diced
1/2 cabbage, cored and shredded
1 tbsp. butter
Melt the butter in a deep skillet over medium heat. Add the onion and apple, and cook until softened. Add cabbage, allow to wilt for a minute, and cover; cook for about 8 minutes. Add chestnuts and cook until heated through. Season with salt, pepper, and sugar to taste.

From the January 9-15, 2003 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

The Chieftains

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The Chieftains


Chief Among Men: The Chieftains’ new album was Derek Bell’s last collaboration with the band.

The Road Goes On

Chieftains regroup after loss of Derek Bell

By Greg Cahill

Talk about an odd couple. On the one hand: Paddy Maloney, consummate showman and gregarious founder of the Grammy-winning Irish folk band the Chieftains–who plays tin whistle and uilleann pipes–a Catholic Dubliner renowned for his onstage antics and casual dress. On the other hand: classically trained harpist Derek Bell, a quiet academic, a Protestant, and a Belfast native (the band’s sole Ulsterman), who cut a bookish figure in his trademark rumpled suit, sweater vest, and tie.

On Oct. 17, just a month after the release of the band’s latest album, Down the Old Plank Road: The Nashville Sessions (BMG), Bell died of unknown causes after entering a Phoenix hospital for what was expected to be a routine procedure.

“We are like family, the Chieftains, and Derek spent half his life with us, so it was quite a shock to lose him,” says Maloney during a phone interview from his Dublin home. “He’ll be sadly missed, the poor devil.”

The last concert the Chieftains performed together with Bell took place Sept. 30 at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, former home of the Grand Ole Opry. “Even then he was up to his tricks onstage,” Maloney recalls fondly. “He and I had great banter; I was always giving him a hard time. Now I won’t have anybody to toss the penny at to try and stop him from playing.”

This week the Chieftains embark on a 30-city tour (their 41st U.S. tour!) that brings them on Jan. 20 to Santa Rosa before winding up on St. Patrick’s Day in New York City. Originally the tour was planned to help promote the new album–which was nominated for a Grammy award this week–but now it is dedicated to their late friend.

Rather than try and replace Bell, the Chieftains are recruiting a different Celtic harpist at each stop on the tour. “You can’t replace Derek, of course,” Maloney says. “He was very unique, a real funny and eccentric character. So we’ve decided to go down a different road.”

That road has led the Chieftains to English-born pop cellist Caroline LaVelle, who learned to play Celtic music during a stint with De Danann. LaVelle, who recently released the solo album Brilliant Midnight 2.0, isn’t your typical cellist. She has recorded with the likes of Radiohead, Peter Gabriel, Sting, and Massive Attack, and toured extensively with flamboyant British violinist Nigel Kennedy during his Jimi Hendrix phase.

In November LaVelle performed at Bell’s memorial service in Belfast along with Irish songstress Loreena McKennitt.

Her current assignment helps fulfill a longtime dream of Maloney’s. He originally planned to hire a cellist back when the band was formed in 1962, but eventually settled on a harpist instead when Bell joined the group in 1972. “I always had my sights set on a cellist to help round off the sound, but then Derek came around and that completed it,” he explains.

The exuberant album Down the Old Plank Road–on which Bell plays a prominent role—explores the Irish roots of bluegrass and country music in a fashion reminiscent of the band’s acclaimed 1992 release Another Country (BMG), an album the All Music Guide called “a never-ending country grab bag of musical mastery.”

The new album also features an all-star country lineup that includes Lyle Lovett, Alison Krauss, Del McCoury, Vince Gill, Patty Griffin, Earl Scruggs, Béla Fleck, Ricky Skaggs, John Hiatt, Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings, and Buddy and Julie Miller.

“The Chieftains came to the mountain, and the mountain recognized its kin,” the Dallas Morning News declared. “It is one glorious front-porch jam session.”

Clearly, the Irish roots of American culture are a rich source of inspiration for the Chieftains; the band contributed two tracks to the Gangs of New York soundtrack, and Maloney has recorded the plaintive theme song to Gods and Generals, a new film about two Irish regiments that clashed during the American Civil War. And that’s not all. Maloney says he is sitting on outtakes from both Down the Old Plank Road and Another Country, and plans to record additional tracks with Emmylou Harris, John Prine, and others for a follow-up in the same vein.

“I always intended to go back and finish that project,” Maloney says of Another Country. “The unused tracks include a session with the late Chet Atkins in which he actually says, ‘Just a minute, I just want to grease the tops of my fingers from behind my ears.’ It’s a lovely line from Chet,” he ends with a laugh.

The Chieftains perform Monday, Jan. 20, at 8pm with country singer Allison Moorer, at the Luther Burbank Center, 50 Mark West Springs Road, Santa Rosa. Tickets are $35-$60. 707.546.3600.

From the January 9-15, 2003 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Charlie Musselwhite

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Charlie Musselwhite


Photograph by Abigail Gumbiner

Take a Little Trip: Charlie Musselwhite goes where the music spirit moves him.

Blues with a Feeling

Charlie Musselwhite is keeping it honest with a new album and a New Year’s Eve gig

By Greg Cahill

There are people who try to figure out how to make a hit record,” says three-time Grammy-nominated harmonica ace Charlie Musselwhite. “My approach is to play as honestly as I can, straight from the heart, and hope that it touches somebody too. If it does and it works, then that’s the key.

“You know,” he continues, “music is such a fleeting thing–you play it and it’s gone. It’s not like a sculpture or a painting or a book. It’s just out in the air, and you have to constantly keep recreating it and hope that it is reaching the listener.”

Musselwhite, who moved to Sonoma County in 1991, has been crafting heart-felt blues for more than four decades. This spring, he released the critically acclaimed One Night in America (Telarc), contributed to a trio of high-profile tribute albums, and picked up his 11th and 12th W. C. Handy awards, the prestigious national blues honor. “Yeah, I’ve been racking ’em up over the years,” the soft-spoken blues musician says during a phone interview from his ranch.

Musselwhite, who performs on New Year’s Eve at the Mystic Theatre, has tapped his country roots for some of his best recordings to date. One Night in America, featuring country-singing sensation Kelly Willis, bristles with the blues, country, gospel, and early rock and roll of Memphis, the music mecca that Musselwhite once called home. It’s Musselwhite’s first album since a near-fatal car crash in Mexico a couple of years ago that left him hospitalized for several weeks.

One Night in America marks a strong return to form.

Musselwhite was born in Kosciusko, Miss., in 1944 and moved upriver to Memphis 10 years later, his family joining the wave of sharecroppers seeking better jobs in the post-World War II South. Musselwhite became immersed in that city’s diverse musical culture. He went to elementary school with Johnny Cash’s brother, Tommy, and lived down the street from rockabilly legends Johnny Burnette and Slim Rhodes. “It was the first time I ever noticed a whole houseful of people with bloodshot eyes,” he says of those late-night jam sessions at the Burnette household.

At 18 he packed a harmonica and headed north on Highway 51 to search for a factory job in Chicago. Instead, he found urban blues, in all its soulful, gritty glory, reigning supreme at such famed black Southside nightclubs as Pepper’s Lounge, the Blue Flame, and C&J’s Lounge. Sitting in with the likes of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and harmonica great Little Walter Jacobs, who took the youth under his wing, Musselwhite soon became a much sought-after session player.

He learned his lessons well.

Onstage, Musselwhite is a blues powerhouse who electrifies audiences with sheer virtuosity and soaring, robust solos that range from a fiery wail to a beautiful melancholia. He’s constantly “reaching and stretching,” he says, not only mentally but with his heart.

The results transcend mere blues performance.

“For me, when I’m soloing, there’s this thing I’m looking for,” he once explained. “You’ll be rolling along and all of a sudden there’ll be this spark; it’s not a conscious thing that you’re doing. Like Charlie Parker said, ‘I just hold it and let it sing.’

“I guess you could say it’s a spiritual kind of plane.”

In 1966 Musselwhite released his first album for Vanguard Records, Stand Back! Here Comes Charlie Musselwhite’s Southside Band. It was one of the first blues albums marketed to a white rock audience and established Musselwhite as a major blues act. Since then, he has guested on John Lee Hooker’s Grammy-winning comeback The Healer, joined Bonnie Raitt and others in a Showtime cable special, recorded with Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead, explored Cuban melodies with the red-hot band Cuarteto Patria, and most recently toured with gospel legends the Blind Boys of Alabama.

But he’s never left Memphis far behind him. His childhood informs several of his recent songs, especially the autobiographical “Blues Overtook Me” from One Night in America, and “Charlie’s Old Highway 51 Blues” (appearing on Fabulous Thunderbirds guitarist Kid Ramos’ Greasy Kid Stuff), which won the W. C. Handy Award this year for Blues Song of the Year.

He is now working on the follow-up to One Night in America. And while Musselwhite can’t reveal any details, he says the producer is shooting for something mysterious. “I know that’s a wide-open term, but we’ll see where it ends up,” says Musselwhite, waxing philosophical. “Often, you go into the studio with a set idea and then once all the players get together, the session suddenly will take a turn in another direction. You just follow the will of the music–the music will show you which way it wants to go.

“You just hope for the spirit to show up and take you on a trip.”

Charlie Musselwhite and his band perform Tuesday, Dec. 31, at 9pm at the Mystic Theatre in Petaluma. Tickets are $55 advance and $65 on the day of the show. Dana Hubbard opens. 707.762.2121.

From the December 26, 2002-January 1, 2003 issue issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

West Pole Bakery

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West Pole Bakery


Photograph by Michael Amsler

Fruits of the Kitchen: West Pole Bakery & Cafe owner Tom “Snap” Gonella shows off his wares.

Bipolar

West Pole Bakery now serves dinner, but for diners, it’s safest to stick to the fruits of the oven

By Sara Bir

It was a dark and stormy night. The deeper into Occidental Road our car braved, the harder the spiteful buckets of rain came down, the steeper the hills loomed, the tighter the curves in the road became, and the blacker the path ahead of us grew. And all we could think was, “This had better be worth it.”

It’s not West Pole Bakery’s fault that it’s so far out there. Well, OK, it is, but the remote charm of Occidental is deeply ingrained in the appeal and general atmosphere of the place. We had just picked a crummy night to drive out there, but when our beleaguered little car pulled into tiny downtown Occidental and we neared the doors of West Pole Bakery, the heat from the ovens rolled out of the propped-open doors to greet us with a warm and cozy embrace. So we were soggy, but the air inside West Pole warmed our bones.

Owned by Tom “Snap” Gonella (who is also the chef, along with “some other people”), an avid biker whose bike shop, Gianni Cyclery, used to occupy the premises, West Pole Bakery and Cafe is itself still youngish, having opened its doors this summer as a breakfast and lunch place. Affiliated with the nearby Taylor Maid Farms, much of the produce West Pole uses is organic, and all of their flours are organic.

The wood-fired oven is the centerpiece of the place, both figuratively and literally: West Pole’s culinary highlights emerge from it, and there’s a counter facing the ovens and the prep area where diners can sit and chat up the sociable bakers. They serve pastries, flatbreads, salads, pastas, and sandwiches during their non-nocturnal hours, and the place has become a social hub for West County folk.

Lunch here is a pleasure. Try one of their panini, made on focaccia–the one with roasted artichokes, tomatoes, asagio cheese, and herbs ($7.50) is excellent. A small salad of flavorful greens tossed in a shallot dressing capped this off as a perfect midday meal.

West Pole Bakery’s dinner service is at this point a bit like the scene in Bambi where Bambi first learns to stand and walk: It’s charming but uncoordinated and wobbly. The demands of dinner are vastly more complex than those of the lunch crowd, and West Pole is in a mad dash to meet them.

The whole dinner service felt jumbled–at 7:30pm on a Friday, though, the dining room was packed, and both kitchen and servers were doubtlessly slammed. Our service was friendly but disconnected and scattered; my entrée came out a full several minutes before Mr. Bir du Jour’s. What’s more, it arrived tepid. Perhaps this is because the kitchen is not yet equipped with a large enough setup to keep food warm between the kitchen staff preparing it and the servers’ picking it up.

These are some of the many hurdles and kinks to be encountered in stepping up to a full-scale dinner service with a menu that changes weekly. To give West Pole credit, the visible response (a crammed dining room) to their very new dinner service is quite possibly more than they had anticipated. These are all reasonable growing pains, and the dining patrons seemed all too happy to roll with the punches.

West Pole being a bakery, a substantial basket of country bread materializes at the beginning of the meal. It was good, crusty stuff, and we downed far too much of it, dipped into a shallow dish of olive oil and balsamic vinegar (I’d prefer straight olive oil, though–it would be nice to have the option of the server adding the balsamic at the table).

The salads arrive at the table in gigantic, shallow white bowls with wide rims–the type of ware that many fine restaurants prefer these days. The house salad ($7.25) was good, especially the greens (though, missing the promised almonds and tomatoes, the salad was basically a larger version of the small salad that comes with a sandwich at lunch), but its presence was totally dwarfed by the bowl’s inflated presentation.

The desired entrée of beef ravioli with sage was out for the night–a gigantic party occupying two tables had ordered all of them. Fair enough. We also saw a procession of caveman-sized lamb shanks go by, looking mighty and hearty, but I went with the Italian-style bouillabaisse ($15). With local prawns, clams, mussels, almonds, and tomatoes in the broth, it sounded like a fine rainy-night dinner.

But the bouillabaisse arrived hastily arranged: a pile of mussels and clams with one paltry prawn. For 15 bucks, a few more prawns swimming in the bouillabaisse would have nicely kept the lone prawn company. If the kitchen had run out of shrimp, they should have either canceled the dish or advised diners that there were no prawns in the bouillabaisse.

The mussels and clams were plentiful and tasty, but the broth was underseasoned and watery. The tomatoes and almonds added no further dimension. The diced carrots, onions, and celery in the broth were still al dente and contributed neither excitement nor the desired flavor enhancement.

As for the pizza, now that’s the ticket. West Pole offers all kinds of pizza topping combinations, but–this being a bakery–they understand that the success of a truly fine pizza lies in the crust, not in the frou-frou atop it (though the topping combinations were all inspired and appetizingly minimal). Their crust is the perfect thickness, crisp on the outside and chewy on the inside, and just the size to fill one very hungry person. What’s more, it actually tastes like something. The pebbling on its surface and its golden-brown color give away its long, slow fermentation.

Mr. Bir du Jour got the Ring of Fire pizza ($11.50)–house-made Italian sausage and peppers, with Catch a Fire brand hot sauce. The Ring of Fire was not as blazing as the one Johnny Cash and June Carter had alluded to in song, but this was easily rectified with liberal applications of additional Catch a Fire sauce, a bottle of which graced every table. (And it’s very tasty: dark with a vinegar pucker and a reasonable level of heat.)

West Pole does not yet have a wine list, but the majority of the diners there that night made do BYOB-style. West Pole also didn’t yet have wine glasses, so people sipped their Merlots and Cabs from glass tumblers, a very European bistro touch that seems appropriate for a bakery situated on a blip of a town in the redwoods.

The napkins at West Pole are paper, the cool and smooth tabletops are naked and exposed, and the bathroom is a small trip around the porch out back. While this is all part of West Pole’s appeal, it’s also odd to think that the last time I ate at a place where entrées averaged $15, there were cloth napkins and small pepper mills on the tables.

It’s such small touches like those that diners come to expect when prices rise above a certain range, and though West Pole is long on homey atmosphere, it’s short on these amenities. I’m guessing that the cost of the organic produce is perhaps reflected in the menu’s prices.

In a few months, West Pole shall have ironed out the wrinkles in its dinnertime identity dilemma. The upscale bistro’s dinner intentions don’t at this point gel with the existing vibe of the bakery: laid-back, neighborhood-friendly, and loose and bohemian.

West Pole would do better to focus more on its strengths–the ones that come from its ovens–than mess around with entrées that its kitchen can’t execute consistently. As it is now, West Pole is an ideal neighborhood hot spot, and their expanded hours are filling a void for residents of one of West County’s most splendidly remote locales.

West Pole Bakery and Cafe, 3782 Bohemian Hwy., Occidental. Open Tuesday-Sunday, 7am-3pm, and Thursday-Saturday, 5:30-9pm (hours may soon change for the winter; call first). 707.824.2408.

From the December 26, 2002-January 1, 2003 issue issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Waterbags

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Waterbags


Photograph by Nicholas Wilson

Liquid Gold: The mouth of the Albion River, shown here, was a potential source of big bags of water for Southern California.

Bagged

A dastardly plan to steal our water out from under us is foiled

By Joy Lanzendorfer

It sounds like a plot from a silent-film era melodrama. A mysterious villain from a corporation with possible global connections swoops into Northern California with a dastardly but devilishly clever plan to steal river water from the good people of Northern California using giant water bags the length of three football fields. With tugboats, the villain will tow the water bags to Southern California where he’ll sell the water to the thirsty people of San Diego, pocketing a huge profit in the meantime.

Our heroes in this story are environmental and community groups willing to stand up for the river and its wildlife. They organize protests and sway public opinion so that hand-in-hand they confront the villain, who withdraws behind the curtain, hissing that he’ll be back.

Of course, real life is never that clear-cut. Underneath the water-bag proposal by Aqueous, formally Alaska Water Exports, is another story about who owns our water and how vulnerable it is to outside influences.

Ric Davidge, who served under Reagan’s sub-cabinet in the Department of the Interior, is president of Aqueous, which also has international ties to Luxembourg-based World Water, SA. His 18-month attempt to get approval to take excess water from the Gualala and Albion rivers ended this month when he withdrew the proposal after mounting opposition and a unanimous vote by the California Coastal Commission to protest the project.

“This is a victory for us, and we are safe for the moment,” says Linda Perkins of the Sierra Club and the Albion River Watershed Protection Association. “But only for the moment. We’re going to continue with our efforts to protect the rivers.”

Davidge, however, feels that his project was misconstrued. He picked the two rivers based on many factors, including their long, controversial histories, which he assumed would mean an accumulation of data on their environmental conditions. But he was “shocked” by how little information there was and by how many environmental studies the state would require him to perform. The studies, costing over $1 million per river, made the plan no longer economically viable.

Davidge adds that Aqueous was left out of much public discourse about the project.

“There’s an assumption of fair play so that both parties would have direct notice of all public discussion on the issue, but we were never notified about several meetings,” Davidge says.

Jim Jordan, a member of Friends of the Gualala River, says he has no sympathy for Davidge, who was invited by his group to explain the project.

“He came and, frankly, his presentation failed to present any science supporting how his project would have been environmentally sound,” Jordan says.

The environmental impact of the plan would likely have been severe, varying from tearing up the bottom of the river for a piping system, to robbing endangered species like salmon of the water flow they need to spawn.

Davidge claims that his project would have had little environmental impact when put in the context of other water-shortage solutions. San Diego’s other choices to fix its water problems include building a dam or river diversions or shutting down agriculture. Compared to these solutions, he says, the water bag is very environmentally friendly.

But the best solution to San Diego’s problem is conservation, say environmentalists.

“If people are going to live in a desert, they should act like they live in a desert and not use water wastefully,” says Perkins.

Davidge’s plans raise the question of who owns water and whether it is a resource or a human right. The problem is that California’s water laws date back to the Gold Rush, when the first miners who came upon water got use rights. This first-come, first-serve basis is why Davidge’s plan gained so much momentum in the first place–the law traditionally would have allowed him to claim the water.

Davidge’s plan may be the first of many as more foreign interests eye Northern California’s water as a potential supplier for the state’s water needs. With this as a threat, both sides agree that California needs to begin a public conversation about water ownership.

As for Davidge, he is reportedly in discussion with other sources, possibly including a now-defunct paper mill in Humboldt County.

“Along the northern coast, there are large commercial users going out of business, such as fisheries and pulp mills, that have water supplies available to a commercial buyer,” he says. “We are in off-and-on discussions with them.”

In other words, he’ll be back.

From the December 26, 2002-January 1, 2003 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

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