This Year in Music

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This Year in Music

Pop Life

Old farts top year in review

By Karl Byrn

THE RISE of Britney Spears, ‘N Sync, and the boy groups has in recent years fueled a music-industry focus on younger audiences. Alt-rock marketing of the mid-’90s targeted 20-something Gen-Xers, but “tweeners”–preteens and young teens–are the tastemakers for today’s hits. Top 40-style radio formats have made a comeback, flush with tweener hits from such breakout R&B, dance, and rock talent as Nelly, Destiny’s Child, Pink, Papa Roach, and Creed.

But during this year, the collective pop music ear turned slightly away from tween-targeted sugarcoating to hear a different, deeper voice. As much as anything, 2000 was a year dominated by established artists.

This dominance took two forms: Veterans of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s reasserted icon status with their umpteenth releases; and breakout acts from the late ’90s achieved journeyman status by delivering on anticipated follow-ups. Oldies like Neil Young, Paul Simon, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, Patti Smith, Madonna, U2, B.B. King and Eric Clapton, Iron Maiden, Sonic Youth, Sade, Emmy Lou Harris, and LL Cool J all received devoted plaudits for their new works–and, in many cases, topped the year’s concert box-office receipts. Meanwhile, developing acts like Radiohead, Limp Bizkit, Outkast, Erykah Badu, Wyclef Jean, the Wallflowers, Joan Osbourne, D’Angelo, Godsmack, Green Day, Elastica, Everlast, and Matchbox 20 sought to strengthen the promise of their initial noteworthy success.

A few factors guided this shift in attention to established acts. As the industry reaped huge numbers selling to tweener tastes, Boomer-aged parents buying Britney & the Boys for their kids (or simply hearing them at home and everywhere else) have been forced to pay closer attention to the pop market.

With older music fans paying more attention and spending more money on their kids’ music, a window of opportunity opened for Boomer heroes like Clapton, Simon, Harris, and U2 to again stand in the spotlight and make waves with a captive audience.

The dawn of Internet music, uninhibited by traditional industry marketing, has also created a reverse interest in the well-known. Younger audiences more at ease with new technology take Napster, MP3 files, and CD burning as a given. For hit-oriented tween-ers growing past the industry’s kiddie-pop forcefeedings, the next logical step is mixed CDs, a venue in which they essentially create their own new releases. Tweeners are becoming less dependent on whole albums, which leaves the record companies with Boomers and Gen-Xers, two demographics weaned on the classic concept of the album as a work of art, much more accustomed to ingesting new music in the album form.

Additionally, the warm reception given to veteran and journeyman acts was something of a response by older audiences to Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP, a lippy work by a new youth-oriented artist that, in terms of its pervasive impact on pop music discourse, was clearly the album of the year. Kids loved his rebelliousness, politically correct do-gooders hated his hatred, and most parents simply chose to ignore his genuine ugliness. Eminem forced music fans to have an opinion, but his success heralded more than a rekindling of the age-old debate over pop music virtues.

He’s one of the first superstars in a new generation of pop music icons, and the vehemence with which older ears dismissed this uncomfortable album signaled a desire for the values of more familiar artists.

THAT’S ONE REASON why U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind has received glowing praise despite being a yawner. Lauded for its kinder, gentler melodicism, U2’s new disc has a high comfort level. Without saying much, they sound good–or do they?

Are these new works by established artists just the comfortable adult versions of tweener bubblegum?

There is a predictable guarantee to Madonna’s sassy electro-funk, Merle’s confessional hillbilly jazz, Neil’s this-time-I’m-acoustic old-age musings, Smith’s literate call to arms, and Sade’s languid fireplace soul.

In 2000, veterans made it easy for older fans to like new music again.

For excitement, though, the upcoming journeymen faired a bit better. Radiohead’s Kid A may have been the album of the year for convincingly creating a musical introspection that thwarted our guitar-rock expectations. Outkast’s Stankonia raised the ease of Southern hip-hop to a hyper-techno pace. The tough country-rock of Shelby Lynne’s I Am Shelby Lynne saved her from major-label reclamation and gave her indie-style hipness. Wyclef Jean’s alt-hip-hop referenced Kenny Rogers and Pink Floyd. Soulfly’s world-metal employed Sean Lennon. D’Angelo’s Voodoo sounded as if it came from a New Orleans connection to Mars. With all ears open, developing artists almost had carte blanche to evolve.

So where did that leave the truly veteran ear?

If Boomers and Xers were really paying attention, they saw that the new releases by their favorites fit into the pop market’s ongoing quest for diversity. Hearing ’90s leaders like Wyclef, Outkast, and Radiohead evolving is reassuring. For Boomers needing a more secure rebuttal to the tweener scene, there are always old farts talking about aging–Joni Mitchell’s misplaced stab at torch songs, Simon’s dismissal of his rock-and-roll memories as something less than godlike.

My favorite old-fart moment of the year was Warren Zevon’s cover of Steve Winwood’s “Back in the High Life Again,” from his typically sardonic and unsettlingly sober disc Life’ll Kill Ya. With only acoustic guitar and his cracking, unsure voice, Zevon recast Winwood’s ’80s synth-world-pop classic as a pure confessional moment. When he unsteadily sings the key line, “All the eyes that watched us once/ Will smile and take us in,” it’s nothing short of newfound optimism.

This year, the extra notice given to Zevon and other vets amounted to a good reason to feel that strong.

From the December 21-27, 2000 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Michael A. Bellesiles

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Fresh perspective on our love affair with firearms

By Patrick Sullivan

IF THE GUN FANS have a Doomsday Clock, it must have been set at one minute to midnight in the months following the bloody massacre at Columbine High School. Gun-control laws started spraying out of state legislatures faster than armor-piercing bullets from a modified AR-15. Even the National Rifle Association’s main man, eagle-faced actor and NRA president Charlton Heston, was starting to resemble that hurt hawk from the Robinson Jeffers poem: “The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes/ The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those/ That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.”

Some people were starting to think–with either fear or hope–that guns were on their way out of American life. They really should have known better.

The most obvious sign that the way of the gun is far from dead is the victory of George W. Bush, who won a fiercely contested election in which the NRA spent millions on his behalf. But there are other omens: after a significant decline, the NRA’s membership is growing again. And there is something else, something harder to quantify: the horror of Columbine seems to be fading. The gun is back.

What makes gun culture so resilient? Historian Michael A. Bellesiles may have some answers. In Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (Knopf; $30), Bellesiles goes looking for the roots of our country’s unusually passionate relationship with firearms. What he finds is so startling as to be revolutionary. Popular fancy locates the birth of our national obsession with guns in the rugged nature of early American life. Our movies and popular fiction present life in 18th- and early-19th-century America as a constant struggle of the firearm-toting frontiersmen against British soldiers, aggressive Indians, and dangerous wild animals.

But in Arming America, Bellesiles argues that guns were actually fairly rare in early America. Drawing on a mountain of probate, military, and business records, as well as travel accounts and personal letters, he makes the case that gun ownership was once the exception: “America’s gun culture is an invented tradition,” he writes. “The notion that a well-armed public buttressed the American dream would have appeared harebrained to most Americans before the Civil War.”

There’s an amusingly iconoclastic aspect to this. Our notion of the effectiveness of America’s citizen soldiers during the Revolutionary War rests on such engagements as the Battle of Bunker Hill. More often, though, poorly trained and armed militiamen (perhaps quite sensibly) turned and ran at the first sight of the enemy. Most Americans showed up for military service unarmed, and what firearms they were given usually came from Europe because domestic production of firearms remained almost nonexistent.

Many volunteers were completely unfamiliar with guns, and they were often terrible shots, even accounting for the notorious inaccuracy of their muzzle-loaded weapons: “One group of Americans hiding near the road fired a volley at Major Pitcairn from ten yards,” Bellesiles writes of an attempt to ambush a British officers. “All missed. They did, however, frighten Pitcairn’s horse, which ran off, leaving the rider unhurt, though shaken, on the ground.”

The general ignorance of–and even hostility toward–guns continued throughout the early life of the young republic. It took the social transformations wrought by the Civil War to change those attitudes: “The Civil War transformed the gun from a tool into a perceived necessity,” Bellesiles writes. “The war had introduced the majority of American males to the use of firearms; peace brought those weapons into their homes.”

Bellesiles lays the responsibility for the creation of our powerful gun culture on two other forces: a military-minded government eager to arm its people; and gun manufacturers like Samuel Colt eager to make money.

The real significance of Arming America, though, lies less in any assignment of blame than in its offer of the possibility of an alternative. Contrary to popular belief, America has not always bristled with guns; they are not an inextricable part of our national character. That fact removes a suffocating inevitability from the debate over gun control.

We may choose to regulate guns more strictly, or we may not. But history hasn’t made the decision for us.

From the December 21-27, 2000 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Pesticide Spraying

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Pesticide Spraying

Bucolic battleground: Dave Henson, director of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, fears that pesticide use around vineyards in the area will contaminate the center’s extensive organic gardens. Henson plans to resist attempts to enforce ground spraying.

Civil Wars

Opposition mounts against forced pest spraying

By Shepherd Bliss

A TEMPORARY ban imposed last week by Sonoma County agricultural officials on a powerful pesticide that caused the recent death of hundreds of birds has underscored mounting opposition to a controversial forced-spraying program designed to battle a tiny vineyard bug.

Defiant supporters of the No Spray Action Network met this week and on Dec. 11 at a barn near the Santa Rosa Creek to forge plans to fight forced spraying to combat the glassy-winged sharpshooter, an insect that can spread bacterial Pierce’s disease and threatens grapevines. Both meetings were called in response to the Dec. 5 decision by the county Board of Supervisors to authorize spraying against people’s will to protect the region’s $2 billion wine industry–a decision that has led some to pledge civil disobedience.

“We have spent over 20 years working on our 80-acre organic farm, and we are not about to let anyone spray it with deadly pesticides,” says Dave Henson, director of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center.

The No Spray group is developing rapid response teams to help people defend their homes from spraying in the event that the county declares an infestation.

The state defines an “infestation” as five bugs, which can trigger spraying for a mile surrounding the insect. Sonoma County Agriculture Commissioner John Westoby has the power to authorize the spraying. Nonviolent training sessions will begin in January to educate residents about their rights and how to effectively resist.

Kurt Erickson of the Rural Alliance was buoyed by the cooperative tone of the barn meeting, which he characterized as “determined, firm, unswerving resolve, but not harsh or rude. It was clear-eyed and focused.”

Meanwhile, the statewide Pesticide Action Network–a coalition of over 140 environmental groups–on Dec. 12 sent a strongly worded letter to California Secretary of Food and Agriculture Bill Lyons signed by local farmers, and by health, community, and environmental groups opposed to the spraying. In the letter, PAN cited the president of the California Certified Organic Farmers, wine-grape grower Phil La Rocca: “History has shown that wholesale applications of broad-spectrum pesticides to control pests is not effective.”

“This runaway spray program threatens the health of California’s communities, ecosystems, and organic farms,” notes PAN spokesperson Jessica Hamburger.

Glassy-winged sharpshooters hitchhike on landscaping plants, like the single one that arrived in a Healdsburg nursery earlier this year and the egg casings that were discovered as well. They feed on ornamental plants, citrus, and grapevines. Harmless to people, they can transmit Pierce’s disease to some plants. Under the plan adopted by the supervisors, city residences are more likely to be sprayed first. Thus far, forced spraying has been used in residential areas in Fresno, Tulare, Sacramento, Contra Costa, and Butte counties rather than in the countryside.

“They are willing to spray our yards with [the pesticide] carbaryl,” observes No Spray leader Mari Russell, a cancer survivor. “The Environmental Protection Agency considers carbaryl (sold under the brand name Sevin) to be a possible carcinogen. We are the expendable front line [of their battle against the bug].

“Carbaryl is a suspected endocrine disrupter, interfering with the hormones that control growth and reproduction. It contaminates ground water and is toxic to beneficial insects like bees and ladybugs. Nontoxic and noninvasive solutions must be implemented [instead].”

Pesticides used against the sharpshooter elsewhere in California are nerve toxins, such as the Nemacur that recently killed hundreds of birds in Alexander Valley and injured frogs elsewhere. Like canaries in a coal mine, critics say, these animals indicate the potential threat of pesticides to human health.

Activists led by the Town Hall Coalition, a west county organization that has fought vineyard expansions and related issues, scored a major victory last week when county agricultural officials suspended the use of Nemacur. More than 400 birds died after its use by the Klein Family Vintners. Nemacur bears a warning label with skull and crossbones and the words “Poison, Danger, Peligro.” The small print reads, “This pesticide is toxic to fish and wildlife. Birds feeding on treated areas may be killed.”

Critics contend that, like Nemacur, carbaryl poses too high a risk to people living near sprayed areas. It’s time we learn from history, they say. “Many chemicals have been used in the past when manufacturers claimed they were safe, only to be banned after they were discovered to be harmful–DDT, Lindane, Dursban, and, recently, Diazinon, just to name a few,” contends No Spray’s research committee co-coordinator Rosemarie MacDowell. “They are used, harm is done, then they are banned.”

Tara Treasurefield of the Town Hall Coalition, adds, “Why wait until carbaryl damages wildlife? Its use should be suspended now, since we know that it will be deadly.” That belief is echoed by other local activists. “It defies logic to believe that chemicals that kill bugs are not going to have a negative effect on human health,” comments No Spray leader Helen Kochenderfer of Sonoma County’s Peace and Justice Center, who advocates civil disobedience if the forced spraying begins. “It’s a personal affront to people who spend years minimizing their exposure to toxics for the county to plan to leave their yards dripping with chemicals.

“People have to act; nobody is going to save us but ourselves. ”

Will Shonbrun of Sonoma Valley notes, “Our government must put the health of people and our environment first, not the economic interests of one industry. Who is willing to risk the health of his/her child from pesticide poisoning so that a wine grower may profit? Certainly not I.”

Organic farmers and gardeners, local officials, teachers, parents, students, physicians, and others attended the Dec. 11 gathering at the Summerfield Waldorf School barn. Sebastopol Mayor Larry Robinson, Sebastopol City Councilmember Craig Litwin, and Sonoma Vice-Mayor Ken Brown were among two dozen speakers.

Sebastopol, Sonoma, and Cotati city councils all have passed resolutions opposing the forced spraying plan.

“The motivations for our actions are as important as the actions themselves. Love for this land and the resolve to protect it can be a sustaining energy which endures and leads to the best possible outcome,” says Robinson. “Love of this land will, ultimately, be far more effective than anger against those who would destroy it.”

Yet the No Spray group does not oppose all pesticide use, only that which infringes on nonvineyard areas. “If grape growers use pesticides on their own land, that is their legal choice,” says Shonbrun, “but they do not have the right to subject others to chemical poisoning.”

But, critics point out, when authorities spray at private homes and public properties, including schools, roadsides, and parks, they have crossed the line. “Forced spraying is an in-your-face violation of constitutional rights,” says Christine Walker. “I would defend my family and my neighbors’ property against toxic chemicals.”

Vicki Oldham of the Mendocino Environmental Center–whose timber-war veterans have attended Sonoma meetings–adds, “A farmer’s’right to spray ends at his property, and chemical drift will not be tolerated.”

The No Spray Action Network will hold its next public meeting Tuesday, Jan. l6, at 7 p.m., at Summerfield Waldorf School, 655 Willowside Road, Santa Rosa. For details, contact no*********@***oo.com or 707/874-3119.

From the December 21-27, 2000 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Dysfunctional Family Holiday Dinners

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Dysfunctional Family Holiday Dinners

Reality Bites

Surviving dysfunctional family holiday meals

By Marina Wolf

HOLIDAY dinners with family are exercises in controlled lunacy. This is so true that in print it looks ridiculous. But I just wanted to say it so that you know you’re not alone in your fear. I blame illustrator Norman Rockwell for our collective ambivalence about special-occasion family dinners. His bucolic depictions of family life have lingered in the public imagination as a blueprint for familial bliss, especially the one where everyone is gazing at Dad hovering over the turkey as if he were bringing in Baby Jesus on a platter. Did you know he lived in New York City?

Not Jesus, Norman Rockwell.

That dining-room scene was probably inspired by the eternal fighting of the family in the next-door apartment and the scrawny plucked pigeons that were the specialty of the butcher down the street. It was Rockwell’s fantasy, don’t you see? Of course, now it has become the impossible ideal that everyone else resents even as we long for it. Face it, no matter how much linen and china and plastic centerpieces we pile on the table, we’ll never make it to a Rockwell moment. We’ve been up too late, or drinking too much, and getting that dull throbbing headache from too many nights on a fold-out foam mattress.

And look at the meal itself! It’s a travesty of justice, civility, and gastronomic logic, all rolled into a two-hour feeding frenzy. One sibling persists in a childhood hatred of all things tomato except ketchup, a young nephew eats nothing but bread, on his plate and everyone else’s. And even though we’re all adults now, and there’s plenty of food left, we eye the other plates to make sure we didn’t get ripped off in the serving-size department.

Feel free to join the chorus, because your family dinners probably have weird characters, too, like an uncle who refuses to stop burping because he thinks it’s unhealthy to suppress gastric functions, or a sister who cleans out her fridge and brings the contents out to family potlucks. But family dinners never stay in the present, with their motley, but surface, issues about eating habits and politics. Somehow, in front of the audience of in-laws, the primal dramas get stirred back up, and that’s a recipe for excitement, if not indigestion. The debate may start out about the stuffing, but stick with it long enough and the whole thing will somehow degenerate into a no-holds-barred blowout about who got better gifts back in 1977 and what that says about each personality present.

Even if there are no actual doors slammed or obscenities yelled, while Mary and the Christ Child look down from on top of the piano and the mashed potatoes get cold, the feelings are there.

Luckily for me, my family has never been much for repressing emotion. Individually and collectively we have mood swings that could kill a horse at 50 paces. So when everything’s going well at the dinner table, we get a little jumpy, like soldiers who have been in the trenches for a week and can’t get used to peacetime quiet. We feel most at home when voices are raised and there’s a little roughhousing around the edges. We’re at one another from the moment we start planning the menu until after the dessert dishes are washed. It’s an inevitable result of too many people packed around the table, too many cooks in the kitchen, each with our own tastes and techniques, and all of them fair game for debate.

Some years are worse than others. I remember one year, when I was 16 or 17, it got so bad that I stormed out of the house to walk four blocks in the snow without a coat. My grandma followed me in her slippers, begging me to come back and finish making the gravy. If not for that serious issue, I might have kept going and frozen to death on my way to the next town.

I remember that day every year around the holidays–there are, on average, three or four such crises on each visit. My girlfriend has witnessed some of it, and we talk every winter about starting our own, healthy, humanistic traditions at home. Maybe we’ll stay in pajamas all day and eat our dinner out of little white boxes with wire handles.

But every year I end up rejecting the new world for a few days and returning to the old, to a family landscape, to the roast beast prepared by nine cooks, and the stuffing that launched a thousand fits.

And sometimes, in the middle of all the chaos, peace descends, a completely unexpected gift from the universe. Such a moment stands out in my mind from a couple of years ago, a moment of utter contentment that came upon me while I was directing dinner preparations.

The house was warm and good-smelling. Everybody kept taking swipes at the appetizers (the highest compliment to the chef, as everybody knows); the night was young, so we had time after dinner for dessert, Scrabble, and then more dessert. One brother was making jokes and laughing at them in that toothy way of his; another brother was frying some onions on the stove. Dad was taking a nap in the living room with a sleeping grandchild lying on his belly like a baby monkey, and I was draining a can of black olives and eating one for every five in the bowl.

Does it get any better than this?

From the December 21-27, 2000 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Gift DVDs

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A potpourri of new DVDs

SINCE the invention of TV in the 1950s, we of the human species, like it or not, have grown increasingly dependent on visual stimulation. With the onset of music videos and video games, with their narcotically satisfying quick cuts and rapid edits, our brains have become increasingly addicted to the flickering stimulation of the mighty moving image. We suck it up, like a drug, through our wide-open eyeballs, and we are happy. You cannot deny it. It’s true and it’s real and it’s happening to you. And though certain neo-Luddites will cry out against it, nostalgically wishing that our cerebral cortexes might all spontaneously regress to a pre-MTV, pre-video, pre-television state, these people are wasting their wishes. We will not go back. We will not go back.

Here then, for all the happy image-addicts on your Christmas list, are a few suggestions of new and unusual DVDs that will be sure to invoke some brain-pulsing rapid-eye movement, even while you’re wide awake, staring merrily at the tube in the dark.

How the Grinch Stole Christmas

Sure, technically speaking, there’s more frenetic energy and visual stimulation in the new live-action Jim Carrey version of this Dr. Seuss holiday classic. But that’s not available on DVD yet, and the original cartoon version is way more colorful. The DVD version features a mini-documentary about the Grinch’s musical feats–“Songs in the Key of Grinch”–along with an interactive Grinch trivia game and a trippy little interview with June Foray, the voice of Cindy Lou Who.

Excalibur

This 1981 Round Table acid-trip was a fantastic blend of medieval eye candy and some very hallucinogenic plotting. The DVD includes feature-length commentary by director John Boorman, who explains the thought processes behind the best film in the history of Sword-and-Sorcery cinemas. Enjoying its 20-year anniversary in 2001, Excalibur is also interesting for early-in-their-career performances by Liam Neeson, Patrick Stewart, and Gabriel Byrne.

Repo Man

Served up in a nifty tin that looks like a box with a license plate for a lid, the new collector’s edition of this genre-defying classic includes a soundtrack CD and a book of behind-the-scenes photos. The DVD itself, about a punk who repossesses a car with an alien in the trunk, includes in-depth commentary by director Alex Cox, a gallery of photos, and the Repo Man comic strip.

Cannibal: The Musical

Billed as Oklahoma-meets-Bloodsucking Freaks, this filmed version of the stage play by South Park‘s Trey Parker contains some of the most bizarre images ever put on tape, including snowbound gold miners singing and dancing their hearts out, literally. The DVD has bucket loads of extras.

Aliens

Yes. Alien was more eerie and elegant–and more downright scary–than its frenetic sequel, but 1986’s sequel, Aliens, by director James Cameron, is so mesmerisingly fast-paced and crammed with rapid-fire imagery that your brain can barely contain it all. That’s cool. The DVD features gobs of extra stuff, including 17 minutes of restored footage and a behind-the-scenes documentary.

Pink Floyd: The Wall

What moron said that Michael Jackson’s Thriller was the best video ever filmed? This 1982 feature-length rock-and-roll phantasmagoria, directed by Alan Parker and based on Pink Floyd’s anti-war masterpiece, is the most amazing blend of rock music and reality-bending imagery since the Who’s Tommy.

2001: A Space Odyssey

This one’s obvious. Since its initial release in 1968, Stanley Kubrick’s mind-blowing fantasia on space, time, intelligence, evolution, and a conflicted computer named Hal has been waiting for this moment. As we hover on the actual brink of the year 2001, our brains are thirsty for the dual hits of special FX light-show weirdness and nostalgia. (Extra! Extra! Makes a great “theme gift” when wrapped up with a CD of Richard Strauss’ grand soundtrack theme to 2001, Thus Spake Zarathustra).

From the December 21-27, 2000 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

‘The Literature of California’

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‘The Literature of California’

Best of the West

New literature collection declares California’s cultural independence

By Jonah Raskin

CALIFORNIA has long been a place of mythical proportions–Turtle Island to the Indians, El Dorado to the Spanish conquistadors, and Continent’s End to the pioneers from the Eastern seaboard. Successive waves of immigrants, émigrés, and exiles have regarded it as both Promised Land and Purgatory, a refuge and a quagmire. Long before I arrived here, I created my own myth of California, cobbled together from novels like John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, and from films like Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep and Roman Polansky’s Chinatown.

My California was dark, dangerous, disillusioning–an American nightmare where cops were corrupt, millionaires were criminals, and men in power betrayed “The People” time and again. Not surprisingly, I identified with Tom Joad, the Okie fugitive on the run from the law, and with Jake Gittes, the L.A. detective in Chinatown done in by his own best intentions.

Of course, I had to see the state for myself, and when I finally arrived in 1975 I was surprised. California struck me as elusive and mysterious, a mirage that rose out of the Pacific, a vast nation within the nation itself.

Like other writers before me, I set out to find the California behind the billboard along the side of the road. After a quarter of a century and thousands of miles later, I’m still searching, though I’ve mostly come to accept California as a landscape where we’re free–at least freer than in most other places–to make up our own myths and to live or to die by them.

The Literature of California: Writings from the Golden State (University of California; $24.95)–published just in the nick of time for the 150th anniversary of California statehood–serves as a useful reminder of California’s mythic appeal and towering stature as a literary powerhouse second to none. More than 600 pages long, and representing nearly 70 writers–not including the anonymous Indian authors–The Literature of California is a kind of declaration of cultural independence from New York City, the self-crowned capital of the American literary world.

And this is only the first of two hefty volumes; the second will cover the literature of the state from 1945 to the present, a period in which California writers multiplied furiously and raised their diverse voices to reach every corner of the globe.

This is not the first major anthology of California literature. That honor belongs to Joseph Henry Jackson’s Continent’s End, which appeared in 1944 and is acknowledged here. Other anthologies followed, including Gerald Haslam’s Many Californias (1999).

But this anthology is bigger and better than previous volumes, in part because three of the editors–James D. Houston, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Al Young–are creative writers themselves and because they spring from rich cultural backgrounds: European-American, Asian-American, African-American.

All too often California ethnic writers and women writers have been overlooked or ignored, but that doesn’t happen in these pages. Indeed, never again will anyone be able to say with impunity that California is the province of white male authors. Jack Hicks, the fourth member of the editorial team, is a professor of creative writing at UC Davis and the director of “The Art of the Wild,” an annual conference for environmental writing, a genre with a long California literary tradition that’s amply represented in these pages.

The Literature of California isn’t perfect. I would have included the insightful chapter “The Character of California” from The American Commonwealth (1888) in which James Bryce, the British diplomat and historian, wrote that California is the “most striking” state in all the United States and that it “has more than any other the character of a great country.”

IT’S A PLEASURE to find James M. Cain represented here, but I’d have chosen a chapter from his psychologically sophisticated Southern California novel Mildred Pierce rather than from his famous tour de force The Postman Always Rings Twice. Moreover, I would not have omitted the novelist and critic Tillie Olsen. Granted, her novel Yonnondio wasn’t published until 1974, but it was written in the 1930s in California–as well as in Minnesota–and it deserves to be included along with the epic and poetic novels of the Great Depression. (The editors promise that Olsen will appear in volume two, but that’s too late.)

Moreover, while there’s plenty of poetry, fiction, memoir, and history, there isn’t a single selection from the theater or the silver screen. An excerpt from a screenplay–say Citizen Kane–would have recognized the craft of the much maligned Hollywood author.

Readers may notice that a favorite writer or work of literature is absent from this anthology. To include every worthy writer and work would take volumes. Indeed, picking and choosing from so many outstanding authors isn’t easy. On the whole, the editors of The Literature of California have chosen wisely, fairly, and with an appreciation for both literary creativity and historical significance.

The book is divided sensibly into four sections that are organized chronologically. The first section, “Indian Beginnings,” includes creation myths and initiation chants from a dozen different tribes. The second section, “One Hundred Years of Exploration and Conquest, 1769-1870,” offers writings by European and American empire-builders as well as humble settlers. The third, “The Rise of a California Literature, 1865-1914,” provides space to internationally renowned figures like Mark Twain and Jack London, as well as to lesser-known authors like Mary Hallock Foote and Edith Maud Eaton. The fourth and final section, “Dreams and Awakenings, 1915-1945,” includes writings by Robinson Jeffers, John Steinbeck, Upton Sinclair, and William Saroyan, all of whom helped make California a compelling metaphor for America itself.

THERE IS a lively introduction to the whole book, as well as spirited introductions to the four separate sections and to the work of each author. Both clear and concise, these mini-literary essays are also inspiring.

“Modern California literature starts with Robinson Jeffers,” the editors proclaim. “Almost single-handedly, he set California literature in the national eye.”

I’ve usually turned to T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Jeffers’ expatriate contemporaries, but after reading lines like, “I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk” and “We have geared the machines . . . we have built the great cities; now there is no escape,” I’m more likely than ever before to turn to Jeffers’ high personal, yet apocalyptic verse.

Of course, like most anthologies, this one has old favorites: Mark Twain’s famed short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”; a spectacular selection from Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Silverado Squatters; and William Saroyan’s “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze,” which has often been required reading for high school students, perhaps because, as the editors point out, Saroyan was “the prime optimist.”

But read “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze” again, or read it for the first time, and you may be surprised by how contemporary it feels, how acrobatic the language, and how the story manages to mix sadness and joy, the dream and the nightmare. Saroyan was an existentialist author before the existentialists, a Beat novelist before the Beats, and perhaps he ought to share credit with Jeffers as one of the founding fathers of both California and American fiction.

The editors don’t only play it safe and stick with widely recognizable authors and nationally acclaimed works of literature like The Grapes of Wrath, The Day of the Locust, and The Big Sleep.

My greatest joy derived not from rereading old favorites, but from discovering writers I had never read before, especially Toshio Mori, a Japanese-American who was born in Oakland in 1910, and whose literary career was interrupted in 1943 when he was arrested, sent to an internment camp in Utah, and had his book Yokohama, California withdrawn from publication until World War II was over. Three of Mori’s stunning short stories are included here–“The Woman Who Makes Swell Doughnuts,” “The Eggs of the World,” and “He Who Has the Laughing Face.”

I wish there were more. They are as fragile and as durable as eggs, as common as doughnuts, and yet as strange and haunting as any short story by Kafka or Gogol.

There are gems throughout this volume, and there are playful stories, essays, and poems, as well as socially responsible works about race, class, and gender. M.F.K. Fisher’s “The First Oyster,” which appears near the end of the book, is funny and delightful. It’s puzzling that a prose stylist of her genius has rarely appeared on college reading lists, but perhaps this anthology will help change that.

ONE WONDERS what New York reviewers and critics will have to say about The Literature of California–if indeed they say anything about it at all. The East Coast literary establishment has often ignored California literature and rebuked and scolded California writers as rude and unlettered, crude and unartistic.

Still, it doesn’t really matter what New York says or what New York thinks, and our writers ought to stop looking over their shoulders at New York. California doesn’t have to prove itself to anybody anymore, and The Literature of California doesn’t have to take off its hat to any other anthology of American, French, or Russian literature. Ours is as rich, as deep, as heartfelt, and as soulful as any literature in the world.

Jonah Raskin is an SSU communications professor and the author of ‘For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman.’

From the December 21-27, 2000 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Seasonal Wines

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Seasonal Wines

Buy the Bottle

Wine gifts for discriminating tastes

By Bob Johnson

‘TIS THE SEASON, and you know what that means: searching, struggling, and stressing to find just the right gift for each person on your holiday list. If there’s a wine lover on that list–and habitating in or near California’s North Coast Wine Country–the gift possibilities seemingly are endless. And, perhaps surprisingly, they need not necessarily involve vino. Better still, the “Santa’s helper” list we’ve compiled requires no fighting for a parking space at the local mall. Everything on the list is a simple phone call and a friendly UPS (or FedEx) driver away.

Ready for some armchair shopping?

Sit back, loosen up your phone-punching finger, and as they like to say on info-mercials, have your credit card ready.

Perhaps the best wine primer ever written, Kevin Zraly’s Windows on the World Complete Wine Course, has been updated this year. It provides a good overview of the world’s wine regions, interesting historical notes, tips on tasting, and much more. Perfect for someone just getting into wine. $24.95. Wine Appreciation Guild, 800/231-9463, or wineappreciationguild.com.

Uncorking a bottle of wine doesn’t have to strain one’s wrist. The Screwpull Lever accomplishes the task with a simple “over-and-back” motion. It’s a truly ingenious invention, and would be most appreciated by anyone who enjoys wine on a regular basis. (Attention, all friends and family members: The previous sentence includes a very important subliminal message. If you are not now reaching into your wallet and preparing to make a call or go online, please reread.) $160. 877/CRE-USET, or screwpull.com.

A less expensive version that utilizes the same lever principle, the Rabbit, is new this year from housewares specialist Metrokane. (Attention, all friends and family members: If your investment portfolio at the start of the year consisted entirely of dotcom stocks, you may transpose the aforementioned subliminal message to this item.) $75. International Wine Accessories, 800/527-4072, or iwawine.com.

Some of the most comical moments on NBC’s Frasier occur when brothers Frasier and Niles Crane discuss or evaluate wine. So it was only natural that David Hyde Pierce, who plays Niles, would one day host a wine-related series on PBS. That day has come, and the six-part series, Wine 101, is now available on video. $89.95. Wine Enthusiast Catalog, 800/356-8466, or wineenthusiast.com.

Gift baskets always make great holiday presents, and two good sources are the Web-based gotfruit.com and the Orange County-based Wine Country Gift Baskets. (Yes, we know they no longer grow wine grapes in Orange County, thus rendering the region suspect as “wine country,” but, heck, they don’t grow many oranges there, either.) Wine Country Gift Baskets features a “local flavor” basket that includes three bottles of Kendall-Jackson wine (also not grown, fermented, or aged in Orange County) and assorted goodies for $99.95, and a “Connoisseur’s Selection” basket with similar edibles and two bottles of La Crema wine for $74.95. The company offers a 5 percent discount on orders placed through its website, giftprogram.com. At gotfruit.com, whose Web address is the same as the company name, the baskets feature a mix-and-match array of cheeses, wines (including several North Coast bottlings), and, natch, fruit. Yes, even those perfectly shaped, seemingly-untouched-by-human-hands pears that suddenly materialize every holiday season.

For the person who has everything . . . from a gift giver not on a budget . . . how about a metal wine rack shaped like a cello? Two sizes are available, one that holds six bottles, measuring 14 by 42 inches, and one that holds 10 bottles and six wine glasses, measuring 24 by 56 inches. We’d add a comment such as, “This gift is a great way to strike a whimsical chord,” but we’re above such things around here. $390 (small) and $585 (large), plus shipping, from Galleria Lighting & Design of Denver. And you even have to pay for the phone call: 303/592-1223.

Local Options

Don’t like to shop on-line, worry that your credit card number might be intercepted when ordering, or afraid your phone might be tapped? Old-fashioned, hop-in-the-car shopping is available nearby, offering an eclectic variety of gifts that won’t evoke same-old, same-old shrugs from wine enthusiasts. Among the options:

ON THE VINE A gift shop where every item in stock has some relation to wine, food, or nature. Many of the goods, such as grape-cluster pins and vino-themed charm bracelets, can’t be found anywhere else. 1234 Main St., St. Helena; 707/963-2209.

ART AND ALL THAT JAZZ Another outlet for rare or one-of-a-kind jewelry, many of the designs related to wine. Also a good source of jazz CDs–the perfect accompaniment to a glass of merlot. 119-A Plaza St., Healdsburg; 707/433-7900, or www.artandallthatjazz.com.

V. SATTUI WINERY Best known for its vast picnic grounds and only-at-the-winery, award-winning bottlings, this also is an excellent source of gift items. And if you’re assembling a basket as a gift for a party host, you’ll find more than 200 choices at Sattui, from artisan breads to delectable cheeses. Corner of Highway 29 and White Lane, St. Helena; 707/963-7774.

K-J WINE COUNTRY STORE Wine-themed gifts of every kind and in every price range can be found here, along with virtually every wine in the K-J portfolio (including the four Cs–Calina, Cambria, Camelot, and Cardinale). 5007 Fulton Road, Fulton; 707/571-8100.

CARMENET MARKETPLACE The newest place to shop for glassware, pottery, and ceramics crafted by Wine Country artists. Of course, you can also purchase Carmenet wines, including the popular Dynamite line. No reports of Jimmy Walker sightings thus far, however. 14301 Arnold Drive., Glen Ellen; 707/996-8345.

From the December 21-27, 2000 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

‘Unbreakable’

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‘Unbreakable’

Supersurprise

Training a b.s. detector on ‘Unbreakable’

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 AMAZING Randi is not easily fooled. From the surprise endings of movies to the elaborate illusions of stage magicians to the insistent claims of real-life “psychics,” James Randi is a master at ferreting out the truth, at recognizing how the trick is done, at guessing, in advance, how the film is going to end.

Once in a blue moon, though, it doesn’t happen. “I admit it,” says Randi, chatting amiably as he signs a pile of letters in his office at the James Randi Educational Foundation in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “I confess. I was unable to guess the surprise ending of Unbreakable. The gimmick at the end is suitably safe from detection.”

So there you go.

Unbreakable, in which Bruce Willis learns that he may have comic-book superpowers, is another collaboration between Willis and director M. Night Shyamalan, the same team that brought us The Sixth Sense, the other movie that completely surprised James Randi.

“It really doesn’t happen very often,” he says with a laugh. “I almost always figure out the ending long before it comes around. That’s why I seldom go see magicians anymore. When I see David Copperfield, I’m doing my ‘ooohs’ and ‘ahs’ at the wrong point in the show, 30 seconds before the rest of the audience goes ‘Ooooh’ when they see that the box is empty and the girl is long gone. I saw it when she went.”

A professional magician turned author and educator, the Amazing Randi has devoted himself to the debunking of mystical fakery and psychic flimflammery. He’s revealed the workings of “miracles” and exposed the tricks of “psychic surgeons.” For years he’s been offering $1 million to anyone who can prove, under the rigors of solid scientific testing, that they have psychic powers.

Many have tried, but no one has yet claimed the prize.

This is clearly upsetting to that legion of tricksters–be they telephone psychics or full-time “faith healers”–who make their living from people’s desperate gullibility.

Well, if Randi’s mystical debunking annoys them, they should try going to a movie with him. He’s the kind of guy who sees everything that is wrong with a film and is willing, if asked, to point out all the gaffs.

For example (and if you haven’t seen Unbreakable, then skip the next two paragraphs):

“I think they failed in one thing during Willis’ fight with the bad guy,” Randi says. “They have Bruce Willis jumping on this guy and being crashed into walls. And Willis is not hurt by the fact that he caves in the plaster wallboard every time his body is slammed against the wall.

“But that wouldn’t hurt me either!” Randi continues. “I’ve fallen against a wall and smashed the plaster and not had to go to a hospital. I think that if Willis were truly unbreakable, they should have punished him a bit more. Things like that bother me.”

Just don’t get him started on 2001: A Space Odyssey. “By God, are there a lot of booboos in that one,” he says.

Randi is also skilled at anticipating what an interviewer is planning to say. “The belief in ghosts and psychic abilities,” I begin, “is a big part of our culture. But the superhero myths are just as rooted into our culture. For some reason we have a real fondness, perhaps even a deep desire, for . . .”

“Fantasy? Mythology. Pretending? Magic? All that sort of thing?” he jumps in. “Yes, I agree. And there are a lot of people out there who don’t differentiate between comic-book reality and the fantasy of psychic powers. I deal with them all the time. There was a fellow in here just this morning,” he elaborates, “wanting to collect the million-dollar prize. We sat him down for a quick test, and he got zero out of 10. He couldn’t believe it. He said, ‘At home I always get 10 out of 10,’ because he didn’t know how to properly test himself. So I showed him how a proper test was done, and he just shook his head and walked out very silently. Guys like this don’t understand how the real world works. They want comic-book fantasy to exist in the real world, but it doesn’t. It can’t.”

“Why,” I ask, “do so many people want psychic powers?”

“Not only want them,” Randi says. “They need them. I’ve often said that there’s no amount or quality of evidence that will un-convince the true believer. I’ve had psychics’ managers come to me and say, ‘Oh no. If you prove that it doesn’t work, she’ll back down on it. If she doesn’t have a leg to stand on, she’ll be the first to admit it.’ And they are amazed after I give the test and she fails it. They say, ‘You were right Mr. Randi. There isn’t anything that will convince her it’s not true.’ Because these people are dedicated to the reality of spiritualism. They need it to be true.”

Randi has nothing against fantasy, however. “Fantasy is important,” he says. “Without fantasy we wouldn’t have so much of the art and poetry and beauty that is brought about by titillating our respective fancies. I’m all for it. But don’t tell me it’s real. David Copperfield would never insult your intelligence by telling you that he really did cut the girl into eight pieces with a buzz saw. He just asks you to sit back and pretend.”

Pretending, says Randi, is a vital part of being human. “I remember pretending to be Superman,” I confess. “As a kid, being a superhero seemed so much better than being a scrawny kid who has to clean his room.”

“I understand. We humans have a powerful yearning to be more than we are,” agrees Randi.

That said, he counters my Superman envy with a Randi-esque childhood desire of his own. “I wanted to be Batman,” he admits, “because I couldn’t accept Superman. A guy that a bullet won’t kill? That can leap over a skyscraper? A guy that can fly? Come on, get out of it. But Batman! He used ropes to get over buildings. I could believe in Batman.

“Then along came Michael Jordan and we find out that guys really can fly,” he adds. “In fact, if I could imagine anyone today who would make a believable crime-fighter, it would be him. Putting balls through a hoop seems a misdirected talent for Michael Jordan. Basketball made him a multimillionaire, of course, but wouldn’t it be great if he took up crime-fighting?”

“What would his costume be?”

“Oh, he’d wear a G-string, I think; otherwise he’d be a little constrained. ”

“And he’d wear Nikes.”

“Of course. No sandals or anything.”

“And what would we call him?” I ask. “The Flying Man? Air Jordan?”

“Good question,” says Randi. “I’ll have to work on that.”

From the December 21-27, 2000 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Open Mic

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Open Mic

Open Mic

Off the Wall

By Jacques Levy

No university wants to be caught promoting revisionist history. Nor should Sonoma State students be subjected to such history at the entrance to their new Information Center. Unfortunately, that is just what the new Cesar Chavez mural promotes, as we learned from the artist herself at the mural’s recent dedication. Philippine-born Johanna Poethig pointed to two tall Filipino farmworkers towering above a huddled figure of Cesar Chavez at the center of the mural. She said: “Delano, California, Sept. 8, 1965. Filipino workers vote to strike. Joined by Mexican workers, they formed the United Farm Workers.”

This is a “little-known fact,” Poethig said proudly. Students and others, she said, would learn the truth and give the Filipinos proper credit. Unfortunately, the facts are quite different.

In 1959, the AFL-CIO chartered the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee and assigned a seasoned white organizer as director, who was later replaced with another white organizer. By September 1965, on the eve of the grape strike, the AWOC still had no genuine membership base nor a single contract with a grower. Most of its members were Filipinos. Chavez, on the other hand, had quit his job and brought his family to Delano in 1962 to found a farmworkers’ union. He met with workers in the fields and vineyards throughout the state and enlisted them in a new, independent organization he called the National Farm Workers Association, which he had patiently built up by 1965. When the AWOC strike reached Delano, he faced a dilemma. He had planned to avoid strikes until his organization was far stronger, but he believed in union solidarity. He called for an NFWA meeting in Delano for Sept. 16, and 1,200 workers voted to strike for union recognition as well as a union contract and pledged to remain nonviolent.

The AWOC provided its members with an AFL-CIO strike fund. The Chavez group was on its own. The strike lasted five years, culminating in signed contracts and union recognition.

The great achievements of Cesar Chavez could be recognized if a plaque correcting the mural’s deceptive history were placed next to the mural.

–Santa Rosa

Jacques Levy, author of ‘Cesar Chavez, Autobiography of La Causa,’ was a member of the advisory board set up for the Cesar Chavez Memorial Mural Project at SSU.

From the December 21-27, 2000 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Spins

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Spins

Rage On!

Aggro-funk heavyweights issue best sides

Rage Against the Machine Renegades (Epic)

Rage Against the Machine’s newly released swan song transcends its status as a record company rush job in the face of the popular rap-metal band’s recent breakup. Though this poorly packaged set of hip-hop and hard-rock covers lacks any information about the originals, the band’s innovative sound and righteous fury consistently brings focus to this well-chosen revolutionary material. Rock anthems like the Stones’ “Street Fighting Man” and Bob Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm” are bent and sharpened with the same politicized aggro-funk that’s applied to rap classics like Eric B and Rakim’s “Microphone Fiend” and Cypress Hill’s “How I Could Just Kill a Man.” On “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” they create a complete war zone out of the title track to Bruce Springsteen’s last musical disc. Epic may have rushed Renegades out, but the integrity of RATM’s insurgent identity is the stronger voice. Karl Byrn

Gram Parsons Another Side of This Life: The Lost Recordings of Gram Parsons, 1965-1966 (Sundazed)

As a member of the Byrds in the late ’60s, singer/songwriter Gram Parsons helped pioneer country rock. He lived a short, fast life. In 1973, he drowned in a mix of smack and tequila at a cheap Yucca Valley motel. More recently, the alt-country crowd has resurrected Parsons and enthroned him in the rock firmament as a tragic hero. These just-released tracks capture a youthful, innocent Parsons honing his skills as a solo folkie during and shortly after his one semester at Harvard University. There is little grit to his workmanlike covers of Buffy St. Marie (“Codine”), Fred Neil (“Another Side of This Life”), or Tom Paxton (“The Last Thing on My Mind”) tunes. And the originals are a mixed bag of ballads and plaintive laments on love and life, though there are early versions of two signature Parsons’ songs, “Brass Buttons” and “November Nights.” Most will find this little more than a curiosity piece. But die-hard Americana fans may marvel at how quickly Parsons rose from these humble beginnings to become one of the most influential musicians on the modern country landscape. Greg Cahill

Various Artists Freight Train Boogie: A Collection of Americana Music (Jackalope)

VANITY FAIR recently took quite a pot shot at the whole American craze in its big fat music edition. And this twangy sound does invite parody. On the other hand, it also can be a helluva lot of fun in a campy hillbilly sort of way (Kevin Russell’s title track), or in a whiskey-soaked alt-country fashion (Cropduster’s “Creosole Blues”). Indeed, this 17-track CD benefitting KRCB-FM–and produced by KRCB show hosts Bill Frater and Doug Jayne–offers a fistful of unreleased sides from local and national acts. And if you’re not won over by Stacey Earle’s sultry cowgirl lament “Can’t You Dance,” then Split Lip Rayfield’s zany “Train Song”–performed with the aid of a stand-up bass constructed from a weed whacker and a pick-up truck gas tank–should perk up your jaded ears. G.C.

From the December 21-27, 2000 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

This Year in Music

Pop Life Old farts top year in review By Karl Byrn THE RISE of Britney Spears, 'N Sync, and the boy groups has in recent years fueled a music-industry focus on younger audiences. Alt-rock marketing of the mid-'90s targeted 20-something Gen-Xers, but "tweeners"--preteens and young teens--are the tastemakers for today's hits....
Read more

Michael A. Bellesiles

Fresh perspective on our love affair with firearms By Patrick Sullivan IF THE GUN FANS have a Doomsday Clock, it must have been set at one minute to midnight in the months following the bloody massacre at Columbine High School. Gun-control laws started spraying out of state legislatures faster than armor-piercing bullets from a modified...
Read more

Pesticide Spraying

Bucolic battleground: Dave Henson, director of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, fears that pesticide use around vineyards in the area will contaminate the center's extensive organic gardens. Henson plans to resist attempts to enforce ground spraying. Civil Wars Opposition mounts against forced pest spraying By...
Read more

Dysfunctional Family Holiday Dinners

Reality Bites Surviving dysfunctional family holiday meals By Marina Wolf HOLIDAY dinners with family are exercises in controlled lunacy. This is so true that in print it looks ridiculous. But I just wanted to say it so that you know you're not alone in your fear. I blame illustrator Norman Rockwell...
Read more

Gift DVDs

A potpourri of new DVDs SINCE the invention of TV in the 1950s, we of the human species, like it or not, have grown increasingly dependent on visual stimulation. With the onset of music videos and video games, with their narcotically satisfying quick cuts and rapid edits, our brains have become increasingly addicted to...
Read more

‘The Literature of California’

Best of the West New literature collection declares California's cultural independence By Jonah Raskin CALIFORNIA has long been a place of mythical proportions--Turtle Island to the Indians, El Dorado to the Spanish conquistadors, and Continent's End to the pioneers from the Eastern seaboard. Successive waves of immigrants, émigrés, and exiles have...
Read more

Seasonal Wines

Buy the Bottle Wine gifts for discriminating tastes By Bob Johnson 'TIS THE SEASON, and you know what that means: searching, struggling, and stressing to find just the right gift for each person on your holiday list. If there's a wine lover on that list--and habitating in or near California's North...
Read more

‘Unbreakable’

Supersurprise Training a b.s. detector on 'Unbreakable' 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 AMAZING Randi...
Read more

Open Mic

Open Mic Off the Wall By Jacques Levy No university wants to be caught promoting revisionist history. Nor should Sonoma State students be subjected to such history at the entrance to their new Information Center. Unfortunately, that is just what the new Cesar Chavez mural promotes, as we learned from the...
Read more

Spins

Rage On! Aggro-funk heavyweights issue best sides Rage Against the Machine Renegades (Epic) Rage Against the Machine's newly released swan song transcends its status as a record company rush job in the face of the popular rap-metal band's recent breakup. Though this poorly packaged set of hip-hop and...
Read more
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