Open Mic

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Out of the Box

By Tara Treasurefield

WE’VE HAD ENOUGH. While state officials pose for photo ops, we’re drowning in pesticides. We can’t breathe. Nature is dying. Our pets are dying. Our children are dying. To survive, we must demand freedom from toxic trespass. We have no choice. State regulatory agencies block even modest attempts by local governments to protect us from exposure to pesticides.

In March, Fairfax passed an ordinance that prohibits pesticides from town property and public rights of way. The ordinance also requires residents to give 48-hour notice to neighbors within 150 feet before applying pesticides outdoors. Following the example of Fairfax, Sebastopol later this summer will vote on a similar ordinance. In separate letters, an attorney representing Pest Control Operators of California Inc. and Paul E. Helliker, director of the Department of Pesticide Regulation, warned Fairfax that the new ordinance violates state law. Helliker contends that, as written, the ordinance could be applied to property not owned by Fairfax, and that Fairfax has no right to require advance notice of pesticide spraying on private property. That, he says, amounts to regulating pesticides, which is the DPR’s job. In response, Fairfax has established a legal fund to defend its ordinance in court.

This isn’t just a turf battle. Helliker advocates integrated pest management, or IPM, which promotes nontoxic and least toxic pest control methods first. IPM doesn’t exclude synthetic (chemical) pesticides, even though they disrupt and deplete the natural world. There’s a vast difference between IPM and organic agriculture, which prohibits synthetic pesticides.

Even within IPM guidelines, there’s a decided disconnect between theory and practice at the DPR. A matter-of-fact report on the DPR website mentions that carbaryl is being used in residential areas to protect vineyards. What happened to IPM? There are organic alternatives to carbaryl, which the EPA places in the group of pesticides that pose the greatest risk to the public health. In addition, the DPR reports that it has the tightest restrictions in the United States for methyl bromide, one of the deadliest pesticides of all. That’s great, except that what’s needed is an immediate and complete ban of methyl bromide.

We’re running out of time. Only fundamental change can save us. Although it doesn’t go far enough, the Fairfax ordinance is a step in the right direction. Hurray for Fairfax! As Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson write in their recent book Cultural Creatives, “When you’re trying to change the old culture, . . . you can’t play within the old culture’s mind-set.”

Tara Treasurefield writes about pesticides, energy, the environment, and related issues, and serves on the city of Sonoma’s Toxics Task Force. For info about the Fairfax dispute with the state, see www.safe2use.com.

From the June 14-20, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

‘Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale’

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‘Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale’

On Exhibit

‘River’ treats Tobias Schneebaum like the Wild Man of Borneo

By

THE NEW documentary Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale is an engrossing visit to three continents, with journeys to the rainy capital of a New Guinean province, the jungles beyond Machu Picchu, and Coney Island.

But the film’s subtitle gives away the movie’s troublesome tone. Tobias Schneebaum, the former rabbinical student turned artist/writer who lived with indigenous peoples of the remotest parts of the world in the 1950s, is exhibited as if he were the Wild Man of Borneo.

Directors David Shapiro and Laurie Gwen Shapiro take the protesting Schneebaum, now 80, back to the places he explored almost 50 years ago. Meanwhile, they’re also teasing out of him the true story of how he ate human flesh in Peru, during his time with a tribe he called the Amarekaire (actually the Harakambut).

During Schneebaum’s visit in the 1950s, these people attacked a rival village and slaughtered the men, ritually devouring the victims. Schneebaum, who witnessed the attack, says he took a bite with his hosts. We see the cannibals as they are today; quite reformed and obviously depressed about it.

It’s also touching when Schneebaum revisits New Guinea to meet an old lover from a tribe he lived with in the Asmat, the New Guinea interior–a tribe that, to Schneebaum’s still tangible surprise, existed without homosexual taboos. The Shapiros don’t underscore the self-loathing quality of gay life in the 1950s. In those days, even the group most sympathetic to homosexuals–psychiatrists–considered gayness a disease. Schneebaum’s dreadful risk at seeking out remote tribes would have been eased by a gay man’s feelings of being doomed anyway.

By the time Schneebaum had published the book of his Peruvian adventure, also titled Keep the River on Your Right, being a sinner had a certain cachet. We see Schneebaum on the chat-show circuit circa 1970 having the cannibal story eked out of him. Footage of talk-show hosts Mike Douglas and Charlie Rose shows us a younger, slightly cocky Schneebaum tolerating a pair of real squares: the hard-charging Rose assures his viewers that he’s taking a no-tolerance stand on cannibalism.

The Shapiros pry one last account of the incident out of Schneebaum, who is obviously sick of talking about it. They bill their documentary as “A Modern Cannibal Tale,” but this meek old man is no Dr. Lecter. Still, I understand why they tried to make the film flamboyant. Schneebaum is a man of few words, and when he’s visiting his old haunts he tends to go completely silent.

Schneebaum seems to have second thoughts about having spread the cannibal tale; the slight bravado he’d shown on the chat shows (“It tastes like pork”) has given way to the piercing regrets that only the aged feel. I couldn’t get over the sense Schneebaum was being exploited. Who’s eating whom here?

‘Keep the River on Your Right’ opens Friday, June 15, at Rialto Cinemas Lakeside, 551 Summerfield Road, Santa Rosa. For details, see , or call 707/525-4840.

From the June 14-20, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Phoenix Theatre, Powerhouse Brewing Co.

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Phoenix Theatre, Powerhouse Brewing Co.

Club Update

Inn out, Phoenix busted, Powerhouse powers up

By Patrick Sullivan and Paula Harris

CLUBS ARE CLOSING, clubs are in trouble with the cops, and new clubs are springing up in the last places you’d expect. So it goes on the live-music scene in Sonoma County, where turmoil is a way of life and fans quickly learn to expect the unexpected.

Let’s start with the bad news. First, the Phoenix Theatre in Petaluma is in trouble again. Longtime Phoenix manager Tom Gaffey won’t provide many details, but he’s not happy with the Petaluma Police Department and the City Manager’s Office. “We’re back to doing battle with the city again,” Gaffey says. “I think I kind of got ambushed here.”

Partly because of that pressure, Gaffey is concentrating on local bands for now, rather than hosting the big-name touring acts like Goldfinger and NOFX that were hitting the Phoenix for a while. One new offering: local high school bands will play the club every Wednesday at 8 p.m. through August.

There’s trouble of a more terminal nature over at the Inn of the Beginning. The legendary Cotati music venue will probably shut its doors for good in July, according to owner Scott Wagner. The club is unprofitable, and Wagner just lost his job in the high- tech crash, so he can no longer subsidize the music venue. The only way out? Wagner says the community can save the club by delivering both money and a vision for the future at two upcoming public meetings on June 19 and 21. For details, call 707/664-1522.

Bummed yet? Well, don’t fret, ’cause there’s a bit of good news too. A couple of new venues seem to be humming along fairly well: the Jazz Jam Cafe in Sebastopol and Felix and Louie’s Restaurant and Bar in Healdsburg are both operating smoothly. And Clo’s Parkside Grill in Santa Rosa is back to offering live music.

Most surprising event: a new all-ages music venue has just opened its doors in Rohnert Park, of all places. The Vision, a new teen center owned and operated by the city of Rohert Park, started staging shows by local bands in May. A group of students from Rancho Cotate High School assists with the programming under the supervision of John Hartnett, the city’s manager of Recreation and Services.

“We’re just feeling it out, seeing what the kids want and how things go,” Hartnett says. The next show at the Vision, which is located at 450 Civic Center Drive, takes Saturday, June 16, and features S.E.E.D., Stygian Creek, and others. For details, call 707/588-3474.

And finally, the Powerhouse Brewing Co.–a brew pub and live-music venue on Petaluma Avenue in Sebastopol–is getting a bit of a makeover. The Powerhouse is doubling the size of its outdoor beer garden with the addition of a large grass lawn, an outdoor stage area, and expanded al fresco dining.

The new beer garden, in an area that used to be a parking lot, will provide seating for more than 100 people. “We encourage people to bring lawn furniture and blankets,” says Powerhouse owner Bill Brandt. “We’re going to be getting some music in there pretty fast.”

In addition to a series of outdoor concerts (tentatively featuring such artists as the Dirty Dozen, Los Hombres Calientes, and the Dave Nelson Band), Brandt promises a musical Friday night happy hour. “We’re going to drag the piano outside under the trees and have local piano players perform,” he says.

Although Brandt comments that noise will have to be kept “toned down,” he adds that even though he’s had to wait a while for all the necessary permits, the city has been pretty receptive to the project. The first outdoor show is planned for next month, and outdoor entertainment will run from late spring until mid-fall each year. The Powerhouse’s regular live entertainment will continue inside.

From the June 14-20, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Horst Trave

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Horst Trave

Exuberant juice: Decade No. 8 finds Healdsburg abstract painter Horst Trave staying fresh and modern. His work is the subject of a new exhibit at Quicksilver Mining Co.

Burning Brush

Horst Trave explores mysteries of color and line

By Gretchen Giles

SIXTY YEARS is not too long to be concerned with the taut longing of the vertical line, to trace the stiff meet of a triangle’s joints, and to investigate the infinite grace of the circle. And indeed, Healdsburg painter Horst Trave remains distinctly interested. A slight, self-effacing man with a German accent still flavoring his speech, Trave is among the original GI practitioners of that muscular post-WWII explosion known as San Francisco Abstract Expressionism.

With the hard-drinking antics of Jackson Pollock in cinematic vogue, it is perhaps easy to forget the explosive excitement that returning soldiers felt when finally able to make art, not war. Trave, a German native who fled his homeland with the Nazi uprising, made his way to the States in 1941. Once here, he was promptly drafted and sent back to Germany, where he was among the first GIs to enter Berlin after Hitler’s fall. Returning to the United States, Trave enrolled in the California School of Fine Arts (now known as the San Francisco Art Institute) and immersed himself in the heady ether of the canvas, an objective realm owing everything to nature but nothing to representation.

Much has been written about irascible abstractionist Clyfford Still, Sonoma County artists William Morehouse, Robert McChesney, and Wally Hedrick, objective painter Frank Lobdell, and certainly such masters as Sam Francis, Hassel Smith, Edward Corbett, and Richard Diebenkorn.

But it’s a fair bet that Trave’s name dings not much recognition in the collective remembrance. Still, Trave, 82, was one of the original bohemians of San Francisco’s art explosion, and in 1949 he became a co-founder of the 12-member Metart Galleries, the first “Beat” gallery by the Bay. The artists in the collective each had a one-man show in concordance with their belief that group shows dilute presentation and meaning–their exhibition slots were selected through chance by drawing straws.

“I was pretty much a loner,” Trave remembered in a 1996 interview of his life following the Metart experience. “And all of those people at that time, they were involved in sort of a mutual-admiration thing; they backed each other up. I never took part in it; I sort of very quietly did the things that I wanted to do. My attitude to paintings was I did paintings because they were meaningful to me, but society didn’t owe me a thing. And because of my morality and upbringing, I also felt that it was important for a painter to make his living in a useful way.”

So Trave built houses in the summer and taught art during the school year. He remarried, had children, and retired in 1978. Many of the brightest stars of his youth have been eclipsed by mortality, but Trave paints on, staying fresh and modern and deeply interested in the revealing mysteries of color and line, serenity and jostle. An exhibit of some of his newest work, paintings dating from 1997 to 2001, opens June 7 at the Quicksilver Mine Co. in Sebastopol.

The works collected in the “Recent Paintings” exhibit for the Quicksilver are, as with all of his pieces, titled solely for the day he finished them. “I don’t like to get lyrical,” Trave says, standing in his studio on a recent late-spring afternoon.

10-3-97 features four triangulated forms that appear to be walking single file. “I see the figures later,” he says. “I don’t intend them.” This one, he admits, now reminds him of “that old German fairy tale ‘The Musicians of Bremen.’ ” Its spare jazz reminds the visitor of Don Quixote. “I’ve never been interested in anything that’s easily identified,” says Trave with a smile.

While many abstract painters begin with the easily identifiable human form, bowl of fruit, or landscapes scenes–slowly honing those subjects down to their very structural bones, erasing and discarding in a quest to find essence–Trave started that way. He’s almost always been an abstractionist, save for early cartoons and illustrations he did as a young man. “I have a natural tendency to long for tension,” he says. “Stroke and counterstroke. There’s something like that in music, I believe.”

The near-musical tension that Trave achieves on the canvas in his eighth decade dances upon smoky, mute-gray backgrounds, the many layered color of its forms invariably reaching up to the top-right-corner trap of the canvas, a constricted world only they inhabit.

ON THE OTHER hand, a set of vibrant works on paper are quickly built with a palette knife, giving them an exuberant juice that Trave acknowledges is “more direct.” But overall, he says, “I’m trying to release something, energies, and the real happening is on the canvas when I’m painting.”

While he may not be painting from life, Trave is hugely interested in it. “There’s a real reaching toward nature, [which] I’m a part of,” he says. “I’m closer to nature than to any religion. . . . The straight line can create factories and machinery that can make life easier for us, but we tend to overdo it and hurt ourselves. I’ve been longing for my vertical works, but again, they remind me of machinery and the overwhelming of nature.

“It’s all so conflicted.”

When asked why, after more than 60 years of painting without major recognition, he still goes out to his studio every day to do it all over again, Trave responds thoughtfully.

“It makes me feel,” he says, “like a real person.”

‘Horst Trave: Recent Paintings”‘ opens Thursday, June 7, at the Quicksilver Mine Co., with a reception from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. The exhibit continues through July 15 at 154 N. Main St., Sebastopol. Hours are daily, 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. 707/829-2416.

From the June 7-13, 2001 issue of Metro, Silicon Valley’s Weekly Newspaper.

© 2001 Metro Publishing Inc. MetroActive is affiliated with the Boulevards Network.

For more information about the San Jose/Silicon Valley area, visit sanjose.com.

No-Spray Action Network

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No-Spray Action Network

Summer harvest: The author engaged in a months-long process of negotiations with local grape growers.

Building Bridges

A personal view of a successful campaign to stop forced pesticide spraying

By Shepherd Bliss

NO NONORGANIC pesticide application will be made on property without the owner or resident’s approval, reads a joint agreement reached last week by the No-Spray Action Network, the agricultural commissioner, the Sonoma County Grape Growers Association, and other groups. The accord was hammered out during four months at over a dozen negotiating sessions on how to deal with the glassy-winged sharpshooter, an insect that carries a bacterial disease deadly to wine grapes.

The deal is a win-win situation in which both sides basically got what they most wanted: No-Spray, a loose-knit coalition of activists prepared to fight the spraying with civil disobedience, obtained options to forced synthetic pesticide spraying against a resident’s will; and the grape growers–who represent a nearly $2 billion industry–got protection for their crops from the sharpshooter.

At public hearings and in the press during the previous six months, the wine industry and environmentalists fought fiercely over forced pesticide spraying. Sharp words were exchanged before and after the November decision by the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors to permit forced spraying on private property to combat the insect that can bring Pierce’s disease, which now threatens North Bay vineyards.

The new agreement gives people the freedom to choose from four options to control the sharpshooter: mechanical means, such as removal by hand or vacuuming; less harmful organic insecticides and repellents; physical removal of the infested plant; and, as a last straw, synthetic insecticides “with information on their relative safety.”

The accord creates a GWSS Task Force composed of four environmentalists, four grape growers, and one unaligned representative. This group will advise Sonoma County Agricultural Commissioner John Westoby and assist him in dealing with problems. Though Westoby says it is not his intention to spray synthetic chemicals without permission, by state law he does retain that authority.

When Nick Frey, the executive director of the Sonoma County Grape Growers Association, called in February to suggest that growers and environmentalists sit down and talk, I had doubts. We had been opponents in debates before the Board of Supervisors and in the press. I thought that it was worth giving collaboration a chance, but I did not have much faith in it.

Frey also called local No-Spray activists Dave Henson and Brock Dolman of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center; the Sierra Club; and such unaligned groups as the Community Alliance with Family Farmers and California Certified Organic Farmers.

We all agreed to meet.

My reservations stemmed from participating during l997 and l998 in the early negotiations between environmentalists and the wine industry on the county Hillside Ordinance, originally intended to restrict vineyard construction on steep slopes. After half a dozen sessions or so, I felt the powerful wine industry was more likely to get what it wanted, whereas the environment would continue to be damaged. Since then, working relations between the environmental and agricultural communities had worsened, owing to acrimonious conflict over the failed Rural Heritage Initiative on the l999 ballot.

When No-Spray was forming a team of negotiators to sit down with the grape growers, I decided to remain on the sidelines, listening. Henson emerged as No-Spray’s lead negotiator. After he and others reported on how cooperative and fruitful the negotiations were going, I decided to drop in to sense the tone of the deliberations. I had remembered grape grower Peter Haywood of the Sonoma Valley Vintners and Growers Alliance from the earlier Hillside Ordinance negotiations as an outspoken, adamant, and articulate advocate. Earlier this year we clashed outside the Petaluma City Hall when a No-Spray resolution came before the Petaluma City Council. But here he was, in person, sitting on the other side of the table, and we were looking at each other eye to eye, in a cooperative environment. Though quite protective of his vines, Haywood turned out to be a thoughtful negotiator genuinely interested in solutions.

After our final meeting, Haywood observed, “This process has been very effective in developing standards to have full support of the community. Grape growers are now much better protected by the support of the community. It is likely that the sharpshooter will gain entrance to Sonoma County on private property. It will require participation of the property owner to keep out the [pest]. Support from the entire community is essential for any program to eradicate the sharpshooter to be successful.”

The need for public support helped bring the grape growers to the table. Critical to building public awareness of pesticide dangers were the resolutions against forced spraying passed earlier this year by the city councils of Sebastopol, Sonoma, and Windsor.

Also, No-Spray launched an aggressive campaign to train property owners in civil disobedience and developed a media strategy (as did the grape growers), circulating a statement to activists on “Telling Your Story to the Media.” The media strategy worked. The Press Democrat‘s original articles and editorials tended to favor the wine industry’s view and to demonize this insect. The daily was doing what MIT linguist Noam Chomsky describes as “manufacturing consent” to attack an insect by using deadly poison that would damage people, other animals, and the environment.

But No-Spray began to refute this propaganda with letters to editors; in articles in weeklies such as the Northern California Bohemian (and its predecessor the Sonoma County Independent) and Sonoma West-Times; and on KPFA-FM and KRCB-FM radio. Regional coverage in the San Francisco Chronicle and statewide coverage in the Los Angeles Times were more balanced, as was a report on National Public Radio. CBS-TV’s 60 Minutes recently conducted interviews in the county for a sharpshooter story scheduled for September.

We were about halfway through the negotiations when Westoby joined the deliberations. After the final meeting, he agreed that “this has been a good process–much better than the alternative. It is good to come to an agreement on the goals of detecting and keeping the sharpshooter out of Sonoma County. This is a real triumph.”

Supervisor Mike Reilly concurred: “This agreement is a real accomplishment,” he said, “a credit to everyone who worked on it.”

By the time No-Spray’s final coordinating council met to reach consensus on the agreement, one person suggested making a sign that said, “Support Our Agricultural Commissioner.”

Negotiators from both the grape-growing and environmental communities assured Westoby that they would support him in efforts to protect the local community and provide people choices, including those that are chemically vulnerable. This community support is a key factor in encouraging Westoby to try nontoxic solutions.

Clearly, the grape growers needed the collaboration of No-Spray. The first step toward controlling the sharpshooter is to discover it. If residents do not willingly allow the agricultural commissioner on their property to inspect, it will be difficult to find the sharpshooter. No-Spray activists made it clear that they would not allow the government on their property if it would result in forced spraying. And they would defend the properties of others from forced entry.

IF THE AGREEMENT breaks down, No-Spray plans to engage in civil disobedience to protect homes, yards, gardens, and farms. Marlena Machol of Sebastopol, a grandmother with children who have been damaged by pesticides, notes, “If spraying without permission does occur, the community at large would lose trust in the process and go back to resistance. Then infestation would occur that would not be found until it is too late, because we will not let the inspectors onto our yards and farms.”

At a meeting of five No-Spray affinity groups, Neil Harvey of the Riverbillies observed, “We’ve made a great breakthrough here. But we should not stand down. We need to keep up the pressure.”

The meeting’s consensus was to maintain visibility and to continue building a base for further action, if necessary.

“This document is based on trust and power–our ability to mobilize people,” Dave Henson contends. “It is about creating relationships. By working together for months, we have created a culture of cooperation,” he adds. “Not a legalistic document, this is a statement of principles that establishes a way of working together that hopefully will become a model for the future here and elsewhere in the state.

“Sonoma County will have many other agricultural and ecological issues to address beyond the sharpshooter, and environmental groups will help us resolve those issues as they emerge.”

Shepherd Bliss owns the organic Kokopelli Farm in west Sonoma County. He can be reached at sb*@*on.net.

From the June 7-13, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Jefferson Starship

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Jefferson Starship

Feed Your Head

Jefferson Starship reprises a classic album

By Greg Cahill

“YOU KNOW, I sort of revolt at the use of that term ‘psychedelic’ because it limits everything so much, and it’s really not what the ’60s was all about,” says Paul Kantner, co-founder of the Jefferson Airplane, sounding mildly peeved during a phone interview from his San Francisco home. “It’s like the focus on drugs by the government and other facilities of those times making such a big deal out of it. In reality, drugs and psychedelia were a very small part of those times, sort of like a very tasty dessert at a great dinner. It was just part of the process, and the drugs were often simply a flag to wave in the establishment’s face.

“In fact, there was a newness and a passion for that newness that really signified those times.”

The 60-year-old Kantner, who learned to question authority early in life as a kid at a Catholic military boarding school, had no trouble taking up the banner for the then-emerging counterculture. And his rallying cry resonated first on Surrealistic Pillow (RCA), the Jefferson Airplane’s 1967 acid-rock masterpiece released at the height of the Summer of Love.

On June 12, the newly retooled Jefferson Starship will reprise that classic album–in its entirety–at the Mystic Theatre in Petaluma. The current lineup features acid-rock icons Kantner and Marty Balin, guitarist Slick Aguilar (from the old Kantner, Balin, Casady Band), drummer Prairie Prince of the Tubes, keyboardist Chris Smith, and vocalist Diana Mangano.

“Somebody dragged me into this one,” says Kantner laughingly, adding that last year the band re-created 1969’s breakthrough Volunteers album on stage. “So we do it along with a body of older and newer works, and apparently it works pretty well.

“It’s a lot of fun.”

It’s worth recalling he significance of the 1967 Jefferson Airplane–guitarist Kantner, vocalists Balin and Grace Slick, guitarist Jorma Kaukonen, bassist Jack Casady, and drummer Spencer Dryden–and their psychedelic landmark Surrealistic Pillow, an album that holds up amazingly well after all these years. “The band boasted a lineup none of its peers could match . . . ; it was the fertile exchange of diverse styles and ideas among the members that produced a vision darker and deeper than any other in acid rock,” wrote music critic Paul Evans in the Rolling Stone Album Guide.

Slick, then newly recruited to take over for the pregnant Signe Anderson, was responsible for a large part of that success. Indeed, her commanding presence on “White Rabbit,” in which she chillingly instructs the listener to “feed your head,” exhibits an icy Wagnerian force unparalleled in ’60s rock. It was a powerful performance that landed her a spread in Life magazine.

“Her singing made [Slick] the counterpart of San Francisco’s other reigning diva, Janis Joplin,” Evans notes. “Where Janis was raw blues urgency, her persona combining the toughness of a biker’s mama with the pathos of a strayed waif, Slick was queenly, stentorian, her voice an instrument of almost operatic authority and her beauty dark, mysterious, and remote.”

On the strength of Slick’s singing, Surrealistic Pillow–which spawned the Top 10 singles “Somebody to Love” and the anthemic “White Rabbit,” and sold more than a half million copies–became responsible for cracking open Top 40 AM radio, allowing acid rock to flow into the cultural mainstream.

The band had hit its stride. American music would never be the same.

“We were just going into the studio and playing some music,” Kantner says of the album’s fruitful recording sessions. “You don’t really have any sense of that when you’re doing it. There was no plan or thought or realization that anything special was really going on.”

SIX MONTHS after the release of Surrealistic Pillow, the Jefferson Airplane took a sharp commercial detour, releasing the wildly experimental After Bathing at Baxter’s–described by one critic as “a great big fuck you to the recording industry.”

“It can get a little chaotic and anarchic every now and again, but in the long run there’s a certain heat and passion there that comes out of that friction and makes for exciting musical moments,” Kantner concludes. “Baxter’s was a very experimental album–total anarchy. That was the nature of the times. As Bay Area residents often do, we went over the line. But that’s what experimentation and exploration is all about. I mean, explorers don’t go out and walk down well-cut pathways. They find a new forest and blaze a new trail. In that sense we were breaking free from the studio system and the whole music business and stating our own purpose and place in it, however chaotically.

“[Baxter’s] was a total failure in many ways, but there also was a certain freedom that helped resolve itself in future albums.”

Jefferson Starship perform Tuesday, June 12, at 8 p.m. at the Mystic Theatre, 23 Petaluma Blvd. N., Petaluma. Tickets are $20. 707/765-2121.

From the June 7-13, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Acid Initiation

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Acid Initiation

The Initiate

A first-time acid trip leads to jail, madness, and a career

By Stephen Kessler

In 1969, Gualala author, poet, and journalist Stephen Kessler–then a 22-year-old grad student in literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz–dropped acid for the first time at the notorious Rolling Stones concert at Altamont raceway. The trip sparked a six-month psychosis that landed Kessler in jail and several mental hospitals, and ultimately led to a career as a poet and what he concludes is a better life. The following, an excerpt from Kessler’s own account of that transition, is reprinted with permission from the recently published Tripping: An Anthology of True-Life Psychedelic Adventures (Penguin/ Compass; $18) by Charles Hayes.

THE NOTION that I was a poet with some positive role to play didn’t come out of nowhere. I was a poet, though it was unclear to me how I was going to make a life of that. I only knew that I wanted to make a contribution to the culture at large. But it wasn’t by merely being a poet that I would make a difference. It was by being poetry, moving in the world in a way that would poeticize not only my experience but everyone else’s.

After several months on heavy doses of Thorazine, I was emotionally exhausted. I’d lived an incredible amount in that time and I felt completely emptied. I was never quite climbing the walls, but I was worried at times. I had paranoid fantasies that I’d be assassinated, that I was never going to be let out, that I was being prepared as a sacrificial martyr. My family got involved when they saw how little progress I’d made in abandoning my delusions, and got really worried that I’d be permanently crazy.

During this time I’d been in and out of a series of hospitals and one of the things that sobered me up was seeing people who really seemed destroyed, way further gone than I was. Who knows when they’d come back? When things were clearly not going my way, when I was subject to the rigors and rules of the psychiatric ward and thought I might wind up like these other zombies, I wanted to get out. The whole thing had gone far enough. So I conceived a plan. Instead of acting on every fantasy I had or saying everything that came into my head, I just played it straight, hoping they’d let me out.

It worked. I was eventually released and, for lack of anywhere else to go, I went back to grad school. But I hated being there. The Thorazine had drained and depressed me and made me sexually impotent. It was the closest I ever came to contemplating suicide. Fortunately, I wrote my shrink in L.A. about that and he contacted me in Santa Cruz and encouraged me to come down to see him. That began a yearlong period of intensive psychotherapy during which I began to explore my personal history for the sources of my psychosis and subsequent depression.

It seems so facile to say, “I was mad at my parents.” I came from a privileged background, growing up in Beverly Hills. I harbored a rage for having been neglected by my parents when I was little, and for being so privileged. I was really outraged that I’d grown up so protected and then discovered as I went out in the world that not everyone had such comfort to back them up. To me this was just an unbelievable injustice. Instead of going out and blowing up buildings or organizing antiwar rallies, I decided to be an artist, and then it was somehow decided for me that I would go crazy as a way of shedding my former identity. San Francisco City Prison was my unconscious alternative to professional school and social respectability.

Even during the worst of it, I felt it was a price I was willing to pay to come out at the other end as the person I was hoping to be. In fact, that’s what happened. When I became a professional writer, I actually created the life I was looking for, even to the point of playing a prominent role in the Santa Cruz community as a kind of cultural agitator–organizing events, doing radio shows, starting magazines and newspapers, writing columns. I tried to integrate my somewhat eccentric skills and diverse interests into a way of life where I could do journalism, poetry, literary writing, and translating in a way that would contribute in some small way to the local community and the larger world. I don’t know if I can credit psychedelics with having pushed me over that edge, to dare to do that, but they were certainly a contributing factor to the madness that brought me there. My psychosis was a crash course in the revolutionary aesthetic consciousness I sought in order to become an artist. If I hadn’t had poetic instincts, who knows what would have become of me? Literature was the real safety net, I suppose.

I feel very lucky that I was able to live through this psychotic episode and emerge from it without being destroyed. My circuits had been fried and so profoundly modified that people around me didn’t know whether I’d ever rejoin the ranks of the normal. But I came out of it actually treasuring the experience. Somehow I got through this extended strangeness relatively unscathed. I didn’t get killed or maimed or go permanently insane. Instead of the devastating breakdown it could have been, the psychosis became a breakthrough into the life I wanted to live.

My aspirations for an angelic mission were in the tradition of Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, which shows a consistent pattern through various hero myths in several cultures: The initiate goes to the wilderness, is completely cut off from society, goes through illness or other physical ordeals, has visions, and then rejoins the community as a wiser person with special knowledge and powers. He may become a leader, priest, or healer.

Although I can’t make any grandiose claims for subsequent shamanic accomplishments, I do feel that I underwent a similar odyssey over those six months. My sojourns to the depths of the unconscious were analogous to a wilderness initiation rite in which you wander in the desert for a while. All I really lost in the process was the desire to have a respectable occupation, to fit in and conform, and to do something my mother could be proud to tell her friends about.

I still believe I was participating in a mythic initiation. I’m not a bit less convinced of this now than I was then. It wasn’t exactly what I thought it was at the time, a transformation of the whole society, which changed a lot less than we hoped it would. But in many ways I still haven’t shed those delusions. I still subscribe to that vision of the artist’s job.

From the June 7-13, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Open Mic

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Randy & Me

By C.D. Payne

DO YOU EVER wish you had cut loose a little more as a child? Back in 1950s Ohio, I was so buttoned down I was the teacher’s pet for six straight years–still a record at my grade school. My only break from youthful respectability came in my long association with a troublemaking pal named Randy.

Even when Randy was just a tot, his idea of fun was vandalizing gas-station restrooms or shoveling someone’s gravel driveway into the corner mailbox. (This latter act may have been a federal crime.)

I swallowed my Goody Two Shoes compunctions and followed along as Randy climbed over fences to explore the mossy and dripping interiors of abandoned power dams. Or got us stuck in the churned-up mud of an off-limits construction site–mud so tenacious it sucked the shoes right off our feet.

Fortunately, I missed out on Randy’s greatest depredation. He was leading another kid astray the day the two of them burned down a neighbor’s garage containing two classic cars. I never thought any kid could get in as much trouble as he did that time.

More typical was the afternoon Randy shoplifted an entire case of brown shoe polish and talked me into peddling the hot goods door to door with him for a buck a can. Though suspiciously out of uniform, we claimed to be enterprising Boy Scouts. We plodded on through a drenching thunderstorm and never sold a single can. Worse, we happened to knock on the door of someone who knew Randy’s parents.

A half hour after I got home, Randy telephoned and belligerently demanded to know where I had obtained the shoe polish. I could sense an indignant parent was breathing down his neck. Taking advantage of my spotless reputation, I denied any knowledge of the matter. As usual, it was Randy who got the whipping.

I lost contact with Randy over the years, but I did run into his dad at a family picnic back in Ohio a few weeks ago. As you might expect, the news of Randy was not good. After an indifferent high-school career, he went into computer programming and is now a vice president of one of the nation’s five largest banks.

Sebastopol writer C. D. Payne’s sixth book, ‘Cut to the Twisp,’ will be published in August.

From the June 7-13, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

‘Art’

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‘Art’

‘Art’ Smart

Provocative play delivers thoughtful good time

By Patrick Sullivan

EVER NOTICE how contemporary art really pisses people off? Of course you have. But I’m not talking about the way every third painting that rolls into a Big Apple museum causes Mayor Rudy Giuliani to fall to the floor and start foaming at the mouth as if he were auditioning for Exorcist II: Mephistopheles Takes Manhattan.

Nope. I’m more interested in the folks who don’t bat an eyelash at a photo taken by Robert “crack buttocks, insert whip” Mapplethorpe or a performance piece by Karen “it’s my body and I’ll smear it with menstrual blood if I want to” Finley.

Because even some of these urbane types develop a Guiliani-type froth when confronted with–gasp!–a monochromatic painting. For them, it’s like a red flag in front of a bull to see a painting featuring white stripes on a white background, a painting like the one in Art, now onstage in a cracklingly good production directed by Jim dePriest at Sonoma County Repertory Theatre in Sebastopol.

“You’ve eliminated form and color, those old chestnuts,” exclaims the pugnacious Marc (played with formidable presence by Craig Mason) in ferocious mock admiration of his friend Serge’s newly acquired painting. That “piece of white shit” is how a third friend, Yvan (Jonathan Graham), describes the work–once he breaks out of his habitual ass-kissing to express his true feelings.

Art is about friendship. But the play’s interpersonal dynamics revolve around that “piece of white shit.” Is Serge (the understated John Shillington) an idiot to spend 200,000 francs on a one-color painting? Or is Marc just resentful of Serge’s new friendships in the art world? And why do Yvan’s attempts to make peace only make matters worse?

The three friends, once close, have been gradually pulling apart anyway. But the monochrome may be the last straw. For Serge, it’s a symbol of his participation in the great dialogue of modern art. For Marc, it’s a sign that his friend is either a pretentious snob or stupid enough to fall for an obvious scam. For Yvan, the painting is an unwarranted distraction from his angst over his impending wedding.

In Marc’s view, the trouble started when Serge started seriously employing terms like deconstruction: “I should have punched him right in the mouth,” Marc recalls with a growl. He despises “the rule of novelty, the rule of surprise” that dominate contemporary art.

Such debates take center stage in the play. But don’t let that scare you. The dialogue in Art is wonderful stuff–full of snappy, bitchy humor, poignant personal revelations, and thoughtful questions about art and friendship. And this production’s three actors carry off even the most elaborate wordplay with adroit skill.

If Art seems a bit retro, if it seems to be revisiting the art wars of decades past, well, so we are in real life. Yasmina Reza’s play scored a Tony Award back in 1998, but irksome artwork has continued to plague us into a whole new millennium. Art doesn’t offer any easy way out of these debates. But it deliver a thoughtful, provocative good time.

‘Art’ continues through June 30 at Sonoma County Repertory Theatre, 104 N. Main St., Sebastopol. Tickets are $15 for adults and $12 for seniors and students. 707/823-0177.

From the June 7-13, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Lost at Last

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Lost at Last

Lost and Found

Trance-techno collective Lost at Last hits the major league

By Rob Pratt and Patrick Sullivan

LOST AT LAST is a hard band to pin down. It’s not just that its sound–a vibrant pairing of techno-trance with tribal chanting and drumming–defies easy categorization. “We’re ancient meets future, a mix of old and new,” explains Om, the group’s programming and synthesizer wizard. No, perhaps the most striking thing about these musicians is the dramatically different impression they make when performing live.

On CD, Lost at Last delivers a classic goa trance sound, a hypnotic mix of Om’s filigreed synthesizer bleeps, Priyo’s textural strings, and Lakshmi’s ethereal, otherworldly chanting. Like most trance, this music has a simple rhythmic undercarriage and little boom factor in the bass.

The band’s live show, however, is a different thing altogether. With set and hand drummers, Lost at Last plays for ritualistic effect, heavy on beats and building tension and cooling down the way a rave DJ spins records to keep up with the ebb and flow of the crowd.

“We want to create music that speaks to all the different levels of one’s being simultaneously, the mind, the spirit, and the body,” Om says. “We want it to be a transformative experience for the listener.”

Part of the genius of Lost at Last is that the group makes computer-driven techno sequences work within the context of a dynamic live band with a penchant for improvisation. Most techno bands playing live treat their set lists and song arrangements as fixed phenomena, having live instruments play along with computer-driven synthesizers or dispensing with performers altogether and simply taking the stage to make tweaks to the gear as songs play out.

With a laptop wired to his keyboards, drum machines and samplers, Om leads live shows in much the same way as early swing-band leaders handled arrangements on the fly. He uses prearranged riffs and loops running on his sequencer, cuing the band part by part.

Lost at Last held its first performance five years ago on the slopes of a volcano in Hawaii. Since then, the band members have bounced back and forth between the islands and Northern California, performing, recording, and searching for enlightenment through music.

The band’s mix of techno music and a jam-band sensibility made them a hit almost from the moment they left Maui for the mainland. With a long-standing hippie-raver underground, the Bay Area was a natural second home for the group.

Lost at Last released a self-produced CD not too long after forming. But this August will see the release of the band’s first major label effort, a self-titled CD from RCA produced by David Tickle, the legendary talent who has worked with Prince and U2.

North Bay fans will get a preview of this new work when Lost at Last takes the stage June 9 at the Health and Harmony Festival’s Techno-Tribal Dance Party, which also sports performances by the likes of Medicine Drum and the Oddvillian Sideshow. This will be the third year the band has performed at Health and Harmony, and Om says the audience gets bigger every time.

“Our show [at Health and Harmony] last year was one of the best shows we’ve ever done,” Om says. “I’m hoping that same energy continues this year.”

Lost at Last performs at the Techno-Tribal Dance Party on Saturday, June 9, at 7 p.m. at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds, Grace Pavilion, 1350 Bennett Valley Road, Santa Rosa. Tickets are $15 in advance or $20 at the door. 707/547-9355.

From the June 7-13, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Open Mic

Out of the Box By Tara Treasurefield WE'VE HAD ENOUGH. While state officials pose for photo ops, we're drowning in pesticides. We can't breathe. Nature is dying. Our pets are dying. Our children are dying. To survive, we must demand freedom from toxic trespass. We have no choice. State regulatory agencies block even modest...
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‘Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale’

On Exhibit 'River' treats Tobias Schneebaum like the Wild Man of Borneo By THE NEW documentary Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale is an engrossing visit to three continents, with journeys to the rainy capital of a New Guinean province, the jungles beyond Machu Picchu, and Coney...
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Phoenix Theatre, Powerhouse Brewing Co.

Club Update Inn out, Phoenix busted, Powerhouse powers up By Patrick Sullivan and Paula Harris CLUBS ARE CLOSING, clubs are in trouble with the cops, and new clubs are springing up in the last places you'd expect. So it goes on the live-music scene in Sonoma County, where turmoil is a...
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Horst Trave

Exuberant juice: Decade No. 8 finds Healdsburg abstract painter Horst Trave staying fresh and modern. His work is the subject of a new exhibit at Quicksilver Mining Co. Burning Brush Horst Trave explores mysteries of color and line By Gretchen Giles SIXTY YEARS is not too...
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No-Spray Action Network

Summer harvest: The author engaged in a months-long process of negotiations with local grape growers. Building Bridges A personal view of a successful campaign to stop forced pesticide spraying By Shepherd Bliss NO NONORGANIC pesticide application will be made on property without the owner or resident's...
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Jefferson Starship

Feed Your Head Jefferson Starship reprises a classic album By Greg Cahill "YOU KNOW, I sort of revolt at the use of that term 'psychedelic' because it limits everything so much, and it's really not what the '60s was all about," says Paul Kantner, co-founder of the Jefferson Airplane, sounding mildly...
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Acid Initiation

The Initiate A first-time acid trip leads to jail, madness, and a career By Stephen Kessler In 1969, Gualala author, poet, and journalist Stephen Kessler--then a 22-year-old grad student in literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz--dropped acid for the first time at the notorious Rolling Stones concert at Altamont...
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Open Mic

Randy & Me By C.D. Payne DO YOU EVER wish you had cut loose a little more as a child? Back in 1950s Ohio, I was so buttoned down I was the teacher's pet for six straight years--still a record at my grade school. My only break from youthful respectability came in my long...
Read more

‘Art’

'Art' Smart Provocative play delivers thoughtful good time By Patrick Sullivan EVER NOTICE how contemporary art really pisses people off? Of course you have. But I'm not talking about the way every third painting that rolls into a Big Apple museum causes Mayor Rudy Giuliani to fall to the floor and...
Read more

Lost at Last

Lost and Found Trance-techno collective Lost at Last hits the major league By Rob Pratt and Patrick Sullivan LOST AT LAST is a hard band to pin down. It's not just that its sound--a vibrant pairing of techno-trance with tribal chanting and drumming--defies easy categorization. "We're ancient meets future,...
Read more
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