The Scoop

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Big News

By Bob Harris

THIS WEEK, the papers are aflutter with a new study from something called the Coalition for Excess Weight Risk Education (now, do they mean the weight’s excessive, or the education?), which ranks 33 U.S. cities by the general heftiness of their populace.

Their findings? New Orleans should change its nickname to the Big Greasy, with a whopping 38 percent of its adult population clinically huge. Other burpin’ burgs include Norfolk, San Antonio, Kansas City, Cleveland, Detroit, Columbus, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Houston.

At the tapered end of the tallow are Denver, Minneapolis, San Diego, Phoenix, St. Louis, and Tampa. The bad news here, as noted by coalition spokesman Dr. Roland Weinsier (whose name anagrams into “Inner lard, so weird”), is that even Denver, at 22 percent, is still gloopier than it should be.

Obviously, we’ve got a problem here. Obesity afflicts about a third of U.S. adults. Every year, about 300,000 of us kick from stuff like hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and stroke. And like smoking-related deaths, most of this carnage is preventable.

Self-importantly, the coalition brags about bringing “new attention to this important public health issue, by providing insight into some of the factors that contribute to excess weight.” So says chairman Dr. Xavier Pi-Sunyer (anagram: “Sex? I pay driver, run”). Evidently, knowing the relative poundage of your hometown might actually mean something.

Don’t get your heart rate up just yet.

The report’s data come from about 20,000 people who self-reported their height and weight. Which means this whole deal probably measures vanity as much as health. There’s no way to tell if the numbers are true.

Moreover, the study was funded in part by pharmaceutical companies developing anti-obesity drugs. So there’s an agenda here: The fatter you feel, the more likely you are to take a pill.

That’s dangerous, too. For example, in California, shady clinics are handing out Fen-Phen weight control pills like candy, often without so much as a physical exam. Most patients seem to be losing weight OK; too bad about the 4 percent developing irreversible, fatal heart damage.

To make the report seem meaningful, the coalition’s researchers did what they term “in-depth anthropological research,” interviewing residents, reading the local papers, and watching people on the street. Just as you and I do every day.

Roll over, Louis Leakey. Here are some of their brilliant insights:

The weight level in Cleveland may be related to high-fat ethnic foods. Obesity in Dallas may result from the local preference for Texas-sized portions. Atlanta residents eat a lot of fatty Southern foods.

And so on. Major screaming, duh.

The adiposeurs also claim that obesity correlates with high unemployment, low income, and a lot of rain. Maybe so: Poor folks usually have to eat the cheap crap, and comfort munching can get you through a gloomy day.

However, since the data are fairly meaningless anyhow, we can also explain it a lot of other ways. For example: Five of the sludgiest cities are within 200 miles of my sister’s house in Akron. And she makes amazing pasta. The other five nosh pits have extremely active chapters of the Christian Coalition. So of course they’re fat–those people will swallow anything. (For the record, “Pat Robertson” anagrams into “Robot Parents.” Make of that what you will.)

On the other hand, the list of skinny cities indicates that thinness correlates to (a) losing the Super Bowl, or (b) having a team too lousy to make the NFL playoffs in the first place. Which makes sense–a weekly routine of cursing, throwing things, and kicking the dog involves every major muscle group.

What should be all over the news is this: Good health doesn’t come in a pill, good research doesn’t try to sell you something, and good newspeople check to see if a study is actually legit before duck-speaking its enormities.

If you’re fat and you want not to be, there’s one good way out. A while back, I lost 50 pounds by not eating garbage and by jogging every day for a year. It ain’t tasty, and it’s certainly not “in-depth anthropological research,” but that’s the recipe.

The best thing to do with extra padding? Burn it. Especially if it’s in your morning newspaper.

From the March 13-19, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
© 1997 Metrosa, Inc.

Taqueria Santa Rosa

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La Familia

By Michael Hirschberg

WITHOUT DOUBT, the success of Sonoma County’s wine industry has caused the emergence of many topnotch local restaurants; great wines create a demand for great cuisine. The fame of such local favorites as John Ash, Lisa Hemenway’s, and Willowside Cafe (to name only a few) has helped to make our area a mecca for food and wine aficionados.

That said, one must allow that one does not live on goat cheese or foie gras alone. Sometimes the most satisfying meals are found at the simplest of places. We locals know that while some may consider a white tablecloth prerequisite to “fine dining,” it certainly is not an essential part of dining well.

High on my list of life’s simple pleasures are the tacos served at the Taqueria Santa Rosa on Mendocino Avenue. Yes, the decor–an odd kitsch-mix of papier-mâché parrots, plastic chili peppers, video screens, and artificial flowers–is a touch bizarre, but much of the food coming out of the kitchen is sublime.

Day and night, the place always seem to be filled with an eclectic assortment of customers lining up to order at the long Formica counter. Spanish is spoken at one table, English at the next. Waitresses dart nimbly between the 11 tables, delivering food and drink in sync with the rhythm of the salsa and tejana music blaring from the jukebox.

The success of this establishment, now 10 years old, has spawned a small chain for the Sahagun family, who currently own and operate five taquerias in this area–three in Santa Rosa, including their new location in the Montecito Center, plus one in Sebastopol and another in Calistoga. Their simple slogan, “Real Mexican Food,” cuts right to the heart of their appeal, and the family’s natural instinct of providing genuine hospitalidad ensures that customers are well cared for.

At first glance, the extensive list of choices painted on the wall behind the counter seems no different than most standard Mexican menus–tacos, burritos, enchiladas, chiles rellenos, etc. Read more closely, however, and you’ll find all sorts of interesting choices.

“Many of the dishes such as menudo [tripe stew] and taco de lengua [tongue taco] were originally designed for our Latin customers, but now we find lots of other Americans ordering them as well,” says Lorena Anaya, daughter of the restaurant’s founder, Francisco Sahagun. “Of course, burritos are still our most popular selection,” she adds.

Let me say up front that I think burritos, as popular as they may be, are insipid and unimaginative: the equivalent of taking all the things on your dinner plate and folding them together into a nondescript pile. To sample what this kitchen does best, try one of the interesting seafood dishes introduced to the menu by Uncle Leobardo. Arguably the best is the ceviche tostada served with lime, avocado, and a bottle of pepper sauce. The coctail de camarones, combining sweet juicy shrimp with tomato, avocado, minced jalapeño, and lime in a tall parfait glass, is also a knockout.

But best of all is the pollo asado–grilled chicken. Unlike the bland boiled chicken featured in just about every Mexican restaurant from here to Tijuana, this chicken is firm, juicy, and flavorful. Piled into a soft taco and dressed with cilantro, onion, and salsa, it is spicy and sensational.

Indeed, it is the “Real Mexican Food” that sets Taqueria Santa Rosa apart from the crowd. A boastful sign by the serve-out window reads: “La competencia es buena, pero nosotros somos mejores” (Our competition is good but we are the best).

I won’t argue.

Taqueria Santa Rosa

1950 Mendocino Ave., Santa Rosa; 528-7956
Hours: Monday-Friday, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 8 a.m. to 10 p.m.

Michael Hirschberg owns and operates Mistral Restaurant in Santa Rosa. He will occasionally offer a look at lesser-known Sonoma County restaurants.

From the March 13-19, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
© 1997 Metrosa, Inc.

Psychedelic Mushrooms

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Natural High

By Gretchen Giles

IN AN INTERVIEW published in the June 1993 issue of New History magazine, Marin author and LSD pioneer Terence McKenna (True Hallucinations) posits that because the human race sprang from the Psilocybe-rich grasslands of Africa, eating the psychedelic mushrooms appearing on dunghills and in the savanna was an early way of life.

They were a foodstuff, not just some leathery dreck to be choked down by college students. The resulting and continuous acts of mental alteration, McKenna asserts, brought a depth of understanding to our early ancestors that allowed them to create a society based on orgiastic mating–preventing fathers from claiming any particular baby as their own, thus creating a community family–an absence of gender domination, and an opportunity to create such far-seeing human attributes as ethics, morals, aesthetic values, language, and altruism.

The Ice Age put a chill on all of that, he notes, changing the ecosystems that supported the mycological magic, and evolving darkly into what McKenna terms “a very neurotic and repressive social style . . . which is typical of Western civilization.”

And oh lucky us, we’re stuck with it. But with a well-informed eye and some free Sunday afternoon time, it is possible to find a bit of that earth-connected wonder right at home without killing yourself in the picking process.

Noting that psychedelic mushrooms are difficult to find in the wild, Washington state mycological specialist Paul Stamets suggests in his philosophical field guide Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World (Ten Speed Press, $29.95) that they are actually more readily found growing right outside the condo door.

As hardy and adaptive as cockroaches, fungi containing psilocybin have reacted through the ages with a “can’t beat ’em join ’em” response to the human desecration of former habitats. Stamets recommends nosing around in decorative garden bark, pawing through the ground coverings surrounding electrical substations, and discreetly peering through the plantings outside the town courthouse and police department (spores drop off arrested “psychonauts,” as Stamets terms them)–all excellent places to find psilocybin mushrooms.

But don’t put anything in your mouth yet. Part polemic (according to Stamets, he once correctly predicted a flood while high and believes that psilocybin ingestion connects one to the fibers of the organic universe), part tips for trippers, and big part standard field guide, Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World reminds the gentle reader that possession and ingestion of the fungi are illegal (and Ten Speed Press devotes an entire page to tiptoeing away with its attorneys) and that misidentifying one can be deadly. Stamets then proceeds to detail exactly how to find, identify, store, ingest, and enjoy this ritualistic
substance.

Writing with the verve of a geeky-cool biology student–genus and phylum play a dizzying role here, though a complete layperson’s glossary is provided–Stamets admits to using magic mushrooms only once or twice a year for psychically purgative effects and nicely offers his wife’s recipe for brewing up a heady, fungus-infused tea.

Safety plays a large role in this book’s focus, with Stamets reserving an entire chapter to the discussion of such deadly caps as those in the Galerina genus, which possess many of the same physical characteristics of potentially hallucinogenic mushrooms but bark much bigger for the bite. The presence of psilocybin in a safe mushroom, he explains, is often indicated by the stem acquiring a bluish stain upon being pressed and by the dark purplish color left when the cap is pressed against white paper.

Stressing that this natural drug is not to be taken lightly, Stamets offers dosage suggestions based on weight and such extenuating circumstances as mood, diet, and life problems. One to two grams of dried mushrooms are a good beginning, he says, and more can be taken after an hour or so for a deepened effect. Other tips for tripping include being in a safe environment with those whom you trust, informing an experienced mushroom lover who is not joining you about your plans–and, if you have dogs, include them.

“Dogs seem to know when you are tripping,” he writes with the assurance of one who knows his audience. One caveat: If you think you hear Rover telling you so, then you’ve taken too much.

From the March 13-19, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
© 1997 Metrosa, Inc.

Cynthia Lamb

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Cynthia Lamb

Family Secrets


The Devil Made Her Do It: Cotati author Cynthia Lamb’s new novel traces her heritage.

Photo by Joshua B. Rosten



Cynthia Lamb shakes her family tree

By Gretchen Giles

TALK ABOUT your closet full of skeletons. While some families may admit to an adulterer or two, an attic-bound mad aunt, or the occasional homicidal maniac, Cotati writer Cynthia Lamb finds herself in direct lineage to the Devil. The Jersey Devil that is, the bogeyman of the Eastern Seaboard, feared through the centuries by over-mothered children who have been told that if oatmeal isn’t eaten, bedtime not observed, the Jersey Devil will come sweeping from the boggy swamps and carry them away.

“It’s a little bit like saying that you’re related to Bigfoot,” Lamb laughs merrily. “Because it’s just this creature that lives in the pine barrens and scares little children.”

Legend has it that Lamb’s maternal ancestor Deborah Smith–a woman of noted healing and witching abilities–came to these shores from England in 1704, betrothed to Japhet Leeds, a man whom she had never met. She bore him 12 children without unusual incident, but then came unlucky baby No. 13. According to lore, the middle-aged Deborah invoked the name of the Devil during the agony of her last child’s birth. When the umbilical cord was cut, the babe grew from infant to man to green-scaled monster in a matter of minutes. It flew the confines of the room, spouting the hot sulfurous breath of the underworld, finally crashing through the window while the midwife and other birth attendants dove to the floor.

By morning, the neighboring farms had been ravaged of their animals, the milk was curdled, the butter spoilt, and the legend of the originally named Leeds Devil had been born.

Lamb’s family name of Leeds was excised in 1939 when New Jersey formally adopted the Devil as its own state demon. Titling a professional ice hockey team after the monster was clearly the next logical step.

“My great-aunts and grandparents have always been proud of the legend, and they’ve kept it alive,” says Lamb, seated on the outside patio behind her country house. Pots of herbs and yet-to-bloom flowers are set low around her, the green vast fields of Cotati broken dully to the north by the newly built strip malls near the freeway. “But at this point in the popular folklore, the family connection has been lost for the most part. Historians and folklorists know about it, but not the general layperson.”

Lamb has set out to change all of that. Intrigued by the fantastic aspect of the legend as well as by her ancestor’s supposed healing and wiccan powers, she began historical research on her family while still in college. What she discovered was that Deborah Leeds, known respectfully as Mother Leeds, was a historical enigma. Curious about her powerful ancestor, Lamb endeavored to discover her in fiction.

The resulting novel, Brigid’s Charge (Bay Island Books, $14), traces Deborah’s early training in the wiccan path, following her across the Atlantic to the cold Jersey shores and on through her early dotage.

“I haven’t heard from the New Jersey clan yet,” says Lamb of her East Coast relations. “I’m chicken about it. They’ve always been proud of [their heritage], but Deborah’s pretty out there. No one’s ever told Mother Leed’s story before. It’s one thing to have a single line in a [historical record] that says that Mother Leeds was a healer and a witch; it’s another thing to have a whole book that makes her a heroine.”

Exhaustively researched, the project took Lamb nine years to complete.

“The book really wrote itself,” she smiles, “and I like to live with my characters for a long time. One of the advantages I think of setting it in a Quaker community is that they were so progressive that they do seem modern. I read their journals, and the women had the same concerns that modern women would have. Not our generation per se,” says the 34-year-old Lamb, “but the generation before: When a woman would preach, she often would go through a lot of the same self-doubting of her worthiness that the feminists of the ’70s went through. So it does have a modern feel to it. I always thought that was helpful; it’s authentic.”

Most authentic of all is Mother Leeds, a woman uneasily accommodating her affection for another woman; a midwife and a healer; a pagan who can feel the bloodlines pulsing through trees. “She just came to me,” Lamb says. “I have very little information about her specifically. I hope that there is a [diary] out there in someone’s attic and that person will write to me and say, ‘Here it is.'”

Planning a sequel to Brigid’s Charge set some 100 years after the Devil’s first arrival and concerning Deborah’s great-great relatives, Lamb continues to write without outline or plan, allowing the characters and plot to happen as they wish.

“What I’m really in awe of is that I sit down and I don’t know what’s going to come out, and then a few hours later I have a chapter,” says Lamb. “And that’s how I wrote Brigid’s Charge, I didn’t plan any of it. I think that what’s exciting about the writing process is not knowing what’s going to happen next, so that I’m in the same place as the reader. I love that. I love that.”

From the March 13-19, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
© 1997 Metrosa, Inc.

Talking Pictures

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Talking Pictures

Booby Prize


K.C. Bailey

Howard’s End: Schlock shock-jock Howard Stern surprises even himself.

Author Marilyn Yalom is exposed to Howard Stern’s ‘Private Parts’

By David Templeton

Writer David Templeton takes interesting people to interesting movies. This week, he takes noted historian Marilyn Yalom, author of A History of the Breast, to see Howard Stern’s Private Parts.

MARILYN YALOM, before I invited her to see the autobiographical comedy Private Parts, had never heard of the film’s subject and star: radio shock-jock Howard Stern. Many would say Yalom is a very lucky woman.

After all, Stern’s gleefully puerile on-air antics–for which he has paid over $1 million in fines to the FCC–have won him at least twice as many enemies as dedicated, worshipful fans. His consistent remarks on lesbianism and on the size of his own penis, and his unrelenting obsession with well-endowed centerfold models have earned him the labels of “sexist pig,” “immoral pervert,” and even “the anti-Christ.”

“My son couldn’t believe I was coming to see this,” Yalom confides, as we take our seats at a Private Parts pre-screening. “He’s certain that I will despise Howard Stern.”

Yalom is a renowned feminist author and lecturer, currently a senior scholar at the Institute for Women and Gender at Stanford University. She is the author of numerous scholarly works, including her exhaustively researched new book, A History of the Breast (Knopf, 1997). Beginning with the question “Who owns the breast?,” Yalom’s History explores 2,500 years of art, literature, and public policy, proposing that the meaning and image of women’s breasts were long ago appropriated for the religious, political, and commercial uses of men. Which leads us to Howard Stern.

“I thought there was one funny moment, at the beginning, when he sees this woman at the airport and undresses her in his mind,” Yalom recalls, sipping tea after the film. “Suddenly we see her breasts begin to grow in his presence. That said it all! They didn’t really have to have all these other women coming in later with their overly large breasts, as if that were the only kind of breasts there are.

“We don’t see the range of bodies here, we don’t see the range of breasts. Now, can I ask that of Howard Stern, and from this kind of movie?” Yalom pauses a moment, thinking it through. “Probably not,” she shrugs.

One scene in the film shows Stern performing a censor-bashing game during his radio show in which characters are asked to supply words that might fill the blanks in the phrases “blank willow” and “blank a-doodle-doo.”

“That was rather amusing,” laughs Yalom. “He was playing with our fear of words, and those words do make people uncomfortable. I think words can have enormous power. They can hobble us. I can remember, certainly, as a child, seeing words that someone had inscribed on the cement. It was as if they could jump off the cement and strike me, or kill me, if I was to pronounce them.”

Yalom proposes, however, that Stern’s desire to be outrageous flounders in his non-creative use of big-bosomed nudity.

“The film showed women totally stripped, but you didn’t see any men,” she says. “You certainly didn’t see him totally stripped. He talks about his own penis a lot, but he never shows it.” Ah, but there was the notorious Fartman sequence in which Stern dresses as a superhero with a derrière-exposing outfit.

“So you got little bits of his buttocks,” she counters, waving the thought away. “If he wanted to show his ass he should have done so.

“There are three women who have been appearing at my bookstore readings,” she goes on. “They show up and they take off their shirts, and sit in a row during the reading. And there they are, with breasts of various sizes. They are, of course, making a statement by uncovering their chests, and frankly, I think that is a little more interesting than seeing only the standardized, male-fantasy boobs in this film.

“But how do we get our ideas about the ideal body in the first place?” she asks. “We get them by seeing only one kind of form.

“If we lived in the Middle Ages, the ideal body would have small breasts. You see that in the painting and the poetry of the time. There was a very different ideal of the perfect body. Then we got the ideal of the hourglass figure around the year 1900, and then a boyish body in the 1920s.

“The kind of body Howard Stern obsesses over–which came to be the ideal in the 1950s–is an impossible body for most women. It’s thin thighs, thin hips, a thin waist, and these enormous boobs. It shouldn’t surprise us that liposuction and breast enlargements are among the most common cosmetic surgeries performed in this country.”

In spite of this movie’s depiction of Stern’s radio program as a kind of adolescent freak show, Yalom admits that it did make him appear–occasionally–somewhat endearing. Almost.

“To tell you the truth,” she smiles, “he really wasn’t as much of a freak as I thought he was going to be.”

From the March 13-19, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
© 1997 Metrosa, Inc.

Ezines

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Ezines

‘Zine Scene


U is for Unusual: Stereolab members answered ‘Ultra’ zine’s alphabetical interview.

Online music mags on the rise

By Matt Galloway

MICHAEL GOLDBERG would like nothing more than for you to never get another paper cut from a music magazine. In fact, the savvy West Coast entrepreneur and former Rolling Stone scribe would prefer that you never flipped through a conventional music publication ever again.

As editor, publisher, and founder of the Internet-only music magazine Addicted to Noise, Goldberg has made it his business to avoid the paper industry altogether. Online since December 1994 and averaging 400,000 visits per month, ATN balances a slate of daily music news with a monthly issue packed with interviews, reviews, and essays by journalism heavyweights Greil Marcus and Dave Marsh.

While countless “real” magazines and newspapers flip their regular content onto a Website, it’s the increasing number of publications that exist strictly within the Internet that are taking full advantage of the technology.

“From the start, the idea was that this would be the place to get news and information concerning rock and roll and pop culture,” Goldberg boasts.

With ATN‘s success as a sort of Rolling Stone of e-‘zines have come the expected cries of corporate meddling. Goldberg stands by the integrity of his magazine.”That criticism is uninformed and could only come from someone who doesn’t read the magazine daily,” snorts Goldberg. “Some guy in a suit isn’t going to tell me what to write about.”

Like their pulp kin, the Web pages of Addicted to Noise still manage to overlook huge swaths of the music underground. Search the Net and between the endless Star Trek and X-Files pages are a few gems like the superb, London-based music publication Silencer.

Silencer covers sacred ground, dealing with musicians on the edge of the rock frontier. The current issue offers interviews with the Dirty Three and Ui, as well as numerous reviews and think pieces.

The Belgian Web ‘zine Ultra takes a markedly less serious approach to similar music. Rather than the usual Q & A, members of Stereolab and studio curmudgeon Steve Albini are subjected to alphabetical interviews, where the victim comments on a word beginning with a chosen letter–A for analogue, B for breakbeat, C for Combustible Edison.

The UK’s Fly magazine deals almost exclusively in electronica and the rise of DJ culture. For jazz fans, Gallery 41 offers photos and interviews with avant-garde jazz musicians like Don Cherry, Sonny Simmons, and Vijay Iyer.

With the price of admission little more than the cost of dialing up a potential worldwide audience, publishers online have been quick to realize that they’ve got a good thing going here.

“Everything we’ve ever done is online,” laughs ATN’s Goldberg. “If you want to see everything we’ve written on Beck, you just type it in. [Without online], you’d have to have a closetful of Spin Magazines–and then find a few years to read through the stuff.”

From the March 13-19, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
© 1997 Metrosa, Inc.

Wild Thyme

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Wild Thyme

Spring Fling


To Every Season: Joanne and Keith Filipello display a savory terrine just right for the warmer months.

Photo by Janet Orsi



Wild Thyme caterers have change of season

By Gretchen Giles

THIS IS WHAT the good life looks like at 10 a.m. on a drizzly February morning: Three quietly occupied workers peel carrots, sauté leeks, and unpack produce in the kitchen of a renovated adobe building near Sonoma. A cheery oilcloth settles upon a small round table flanked by unmatched chairs in a long-windowed main room. A bright playpen nestles into the corner of an office, waiting for the day’s arrival of a secretary’s 4-month-old baby. Adjacent to the office, a cookbook library awaits final shelving, an electric-blue drum kit sits unused in the corner, and a burned-out baking sheet–savagely scratched at–is affixed within a funky frame hanging on the wall.

The good life doesn’t require much: It smells like leeks and butter and sage cooking before noon; it sounds like the Cuban dance, gospel, and bluegrass music that bounces from the kitchen’s CD player; it looks like a half-dozen well-dripped candles arranged carelessly on an old wooden table. And it is lived by Keith and Joanne Filipello, chefs and proprietors of the 8-year-old Wild Thyme catering company housed in their Sazón de El Verano complex of tasting, dining, and working rooms.

The Filipellos, who owned the Capri and Eastside Grill restaurants on Sonoma Plaza before unhappy legal times with their former partners lost them the grill and sent them expatriating themselves to Europe for a few rejuvenating years, have stood the heat of the kitchen for some time.

Keith cooked at San Francisco’s venerable Ernie’s restaurant before working under chef Masa at Napa Valley’s esteemed Auberge du Soleil and becoming the banquet chef for the Sonoma Mission Inn. Joanne created the gourmet deli for the Sonoma Market after acting for some years as head chef at Sonoma’s fashionable Westerbeke Ranch complex.

One can safely assume that between the two of them, they can operate a Cuisinart.

What they also want to operate is a Website offering the professional profiles of some 60 servers available for extra wait-work, classes on food and wine service and on food and wine period, kitchen ESL for both sides of the language barrier, and a lending library of cookbooks that far exceeds what the public library offers, including reference books written and signed by the late M.F.K. Fisher, a great friend of the Filipellos.

All this change at Wild Thyme begins with the changing of the seasons.

Although the unhappy damp of the morning lies wetly puddled on Sazón’s patio, there are plum trees pinkly lining the streets and hay-fever sufferers are already acutely aware that the acacia are in bloom. Spring, in fact, is on its blustery way. And with the coming of lighter days, cooks (and that means anyone who can open a can) get anxious to clear the cupboards and bring the season to the table. The Filipellos assert that, Kermit notwithstanding, it is easy being green.

“Certainly the color green comes to mind in the spring,” says Joanne, a soft-spoken woman who seats herself at the oilcloth-covered table. “All the wonderful greens that are fresh and local, aside from some root vegetables–carrots and things like that. But I really like to play up the spring green idea, including baby bok choy, even field mustards,” she adds, asserting that ingenious cooks can simply wade into the mustard fields yellowing most county hillsides and return to the car with an armful of dinner. Or, at least, an armful of dinner additions. “You can put the flowers in salads, you can mix the greens with other greens,” Filipello says. “The leaves are kind of hot, but that adds a note of spice.”

Filipello also recommends a Spring Green Lasagne full of sautéed leafy vegetables. Filled with ricotta or fresh local soft Jack cheese, as well as aged Jack, this lasagne is melded with a béchamel sauce and layered between spinach pasta for the final color note.

“What else?” she muses. “Hmmm, well, fresh pea soup works really well. A lot of people like that with a touch of fresh mint, which is just starting to come in.” Prepare the soup with a good vegetable or chicken stock blended into an olive oil­based sauté of onions and well-chopped leeks, add about a pound of shelled fresh peas, and cook until tender. Purée the mixture and add enough cream to lighten. Serve with fresh chopped mint.

Keith Filipello returns from a last-minute produce run in preparation for the night’s catering job. His hands enlarged from work like a farmer’s, Filipello dislikes shopping for fresh produce anywhere other than straight from the fields. “We rely a lot on the farmers’ market here in town,” he says, “because that really gives you a pulse of what’s growing here in the county.”

“Did you go this week?” his wife asks, having been away for the weekend. He affirms. “Did you get beets?” she inquires. A smile spreads across Filipello’s face.

“Yes. Sweet, sweet Target beets, wonderful Target beets,” he reminisces. “There’s always borscht,” he chuckles, “but my preference is to have them lightly steamed and then sliced with just a bit of balsamic vinegar and some extra-virgin olive oil on top, and some chopped chives. The flavor just leaps out at you, it becomes almost a sweet/sour thing because of the sweetness of the beets.”

Greens, peas, beets, playpens, gospel music, cookbooks, fresh coffee warming a cup at 10 a.m. on a drizzly February morning. The good life.

Daylong spring-menu classes are held on consecutive Tuesdays in March beginning March 11, with an emphasis on Sonoma County products. 19030 Railroad Ave., El Verano. For information, call 996-9453.

From the March 6-12, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
© 1997 Metrosa, Inc.

Youth in Helen Putnam Plaza

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Youth in Helen Putnam Plaza

Tell No Lies


Hanging Out: Petaluma teens Alison Anderson, 16, Adam Lovato, 15, and Fred Gray, 15.

Photo by Janet Orsi



Has the press misled the public about Petaluma youth invading Helen Putnam Plaza?

By Paula Harris

A MINIATURE PARK in downtown Petaluma–set with cozy benches, grassy plots, a small fountain, and designed for the enjoyment of everyone–is making no one happy these days. A recent flurry of articles in local newspapers has depicted Helen Putnam Plaza on Petaluma Boulevard North as a combat zone, where merchants and a horde of supposedly arrogant youths are duking it out amid petty crime and proposals to install video surveillance cameras and blaring classical music as deterrents.

But now, some factions involved in the fracas are downplaying the reported conflicts, saying the mainstream press has both overblown and inflamed the situation.

“I thought World War III was going on here, but that’s not the case,” says Jim Matto-Shepherd, a local psychologist brought in by the Petaluma Downtown Association last week to mediate the various factions. “I guess the press focuses on what sounds more dramatic.”

Merchants, police, and city officials, according to published reports, were bent on using “Orwellian” electronic monitoring of activities and tracking of individuals to quell crimes by youths congregating in the park.

Youth crimes cited in the reports range from such petty offenses as swearing, spitting, panhandling, playing bongo drums, skateboarding, and blocking doorways to vandalism and drug abuse.

Jill Scatchard, owner of the Boosha gift shop on the plaza, says the reports are “inaccurate” and that the press is “overplaying” the circumstances. “They’re trying to create a negative ‘us and them’ feel to it,” she says. “The merchants in the plaza know the majority of people by name. There’s a wide variety agewise, but the majority are perfectly well-behaved.”

In addition, Linda Buffo, executive director of the 175-member Petaluma Downtown Association, claims articles in the Petaluma Argus Courier misstated that she labeled youths in the park “social deviates.”

“This was inaccurate and only incensed the situation,” she maintains. “We intend to seek a retraction.”

However, even without assigning individuals that specific label, Buffo states that the conduct of some of the youths in the downtown park is not socially acceptable. “We’re addressing behaviors,” she observes. “These aren’t just policing issues. We’re putting together a collective of people that want to change behaviors. We need to go back to being respectful of others, understand about old-fashioned respect for each other.”

A Feb. 27 merchants’ forum sought to outline solutions and organize a general meeting with community members, including the youths who congregate in the park. “We’re searching for a way to have a dialogue and we’re seeking advice from Petaluma People Services Center, Parks and Recreation, the City Council, the school district, the chamber of commerce, and other agencies to help put together a dialogue,” explains Buffo. “We don’t want confrontation and negative energy–we want only positive energy.”

She says a steering committee is being formed and there are plans to redesign areas of the park, which merchants say impede customers from walking into businesses. Buffo says changes–some suggested by Petaluma High School drafting class students–will be in keeping with the general scheme of the park. “There will be no gates, no thorny bushes. We’ll still have grassy areas and a new stagelike area for performances and presenting awards during parades,” she says.

MEANWHILE, youths who have gathered in the centrally located park–which was dedicated in 1987 by the city of Petaluma and its citizens in memory of former mayor and county supervisor Helen Putnam, long before recent merchants, including Starbucks, moved in–are dismayed the turn of events.

It’s unfortunate people frown on us because we have a place to hang out,” says Petaluma High School student Alison Anderson, 16, gesturing towards the green lawn with an arm jangling with thin silver bangles. “As for putting in music, that’s very amusing–we love classical,” she adds. “If they were playing Beethoven, I’d think it was cool. They think culture is going to push us away.”

She ways that Buffo’s goal to change behavior patterns won’t work. “You can’t change individuals unless you know them personally,” she observes. “Granted, some of the actions of some of the people can be quite disrespectful, but anywhere in life, some of the people are going to break the rules.

“It’s too bad these few are giving us a collective bad name.”

The teens say they congregate in Putnam Plaza because it’s in a central part of town (many live just blocks away); because it’s close to the Phoenix Theatre, where there’s a well-defined counterculture social scene; and because in Petaluma “there’s not much to do that doesn’t take a lot of money.”

“My parents like me to hang out here–it’s central and if there’s an emergency and my mom needs to find me, she knows I’m within a three-block radius,” says Valley Oaks student Adam Lovato, 15. “But the cops want us out of here.”

Fred Gray, a 15-year-old Petaluma High School student with spiked, dyed blond hair agrees. “If we needed a baby sitter, our parents would have got one for us,” he comments. “This is a social hangout–a public place to hang out after school with friends.”

Petaluma Police Capt. Pat Parks says the corridor between Putnam Plaza and the Keller Street parking garage has the “greatest concentration of [police] calls” in the downtown area. His says recent crimes have varied from drug and alcohol violations and auto burglary to unruly behavior and acts of vandalism. “The activity there does have an impact on the businesses. There have been complaints from merchants and patrons; the element of fear certainly is accurate,” says Parks, adding that police will continue to patrol the park “pretty vigorously.”

Last Friday, Parks says he sat in the plaza in plain clothes for one and a half hours and monitored activities there. “There was some intimidating behavior, but a lot of the individuals used it in the manner intended–they chatted and did the kinds of things we’d expect,” he reports.

However, he says, plans are in the works for broadcasting amplified classical music, a tactic that has had little success in deterring youth from congregating in Santa Rosa’s Courthouse Square and elsewhere in the Bay Area. “Speakers have been purchased and the city has issued a permit,” Parks says.

The question of installing video cameras outside the public rest rooms adjacent to the plaza, which merchants say have sustained some $3,000 damage in recent months, remains undecided. Pam Allen, manager of the Starbucks building, where the rest rooms are located, says owners have “no plans for putting in cameras.”

But merchants say they will continue to clamp down on crime in the plaza. “We’re calling for a line that nobody crosses,” says Buffo. “We’ll never have a Disneyland, but our goal is to have as little illegal activity as possible.”

From the March 6-12, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
© 1997 Metrosa, Inc.

Sound/Image/Object

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Sound/Image/Object

Media Savvy


Janet Orsi

Illuminated Manuscript: Artist Colin Stinson crouches beside his testament to the end of the written word.

Emerging artists take up technology

By Gretchen Giles

AS THE WHITE-NOISE background of high-level technology infiltrates all our lives–the constant demanding buzz of the television, the insistent beep of the fax, the telephone bossily taking its own messages, the sexy intonations of the computerized female who informs us via the Internet, “You’ve got mail”–most have us have done exactly what those humans who wish to survive have always done: we’ve adapted.

Artists have adapted, too, taking the barrage of new technology and smoothing it into a pastiche of work that embraces the new media. From the explorations of Nam June Paik–the “George Washington of video art”–to the performance mania of Laurie Anderson, to Bill Viola’s life-sized screen installations (now showing at New York’s Guggenheim Museum), technologically driven art is as here to stay as marble and acrylics ever were.

In the new exhibit “Sound/Image/Object,” Sonoma State University Art Gallery director Michael Schwager wades into this territory, hosting the work of five emerging technology artists. “For me, this is something really important to explore,” Schwager says, standing in the empty white gallery as artist Colin Stinson installs his works behind him.

One of Stinson’s pieces is a steel-entombed eulogy to the printed word encased in a bird’s-eye metal. Titled “Illuminated Manuscript,” the piece is built along the lines of a coffin, housing in one side a glass-cast little red book–half Mao, half Bible–and on the other a television screen flickering blindly under a glass-screened reproduction of an old RCA ad.

“There are so many people nowadays who are using media–not just video, but all sorts of media–in their work that I thought that it was time to take a look at it,” Schwager continues.

“For us,” he says, referring to his gallery, “this kind of stuff hasn’t come up on the radar screen–probably because we have mostly traditional media here. People aren’t thinking about it; students aren’t demanding it. But whether or not we get to teach it, this kind of art will definitely be part of our program.”

Discussing the Guggenheim’s show of life-sized videos depicting Viola both being tremendously wetted and enduring fire, Schwager–who has just returned from Manhattan–excitedly says, “It’s totally primal. I first thought of him, but then I decided that I wanted to see who would be the next Bill Viola; who is coming out and starting their career.

“I also wanted everything to have the object-oriented aspect,” he says. “I didn’t want to see a bunch of computers on a table or the old-fashioned TV on a pedestal with a video monitor below, just watching tapes. That’s the older version of media art, and I think that nowadays, people are making objects and making sculptural things that have this media side to it.”

Rebeca Bollinger, Stephen Galloway, Maizie Gilbert, the members of the Chicano group Los Tricksters, Stinson, and Mary Tsiongas are the artists represented, their work ranging from Gilbert’s photo-and-sound collage to Bollinger’s riff on keywords from the Compuserve online service. In Bollinger’s piece, “Alphabetically Sorted,” a sexy, female cybervoice reads scrolling words until the whole effect is both a hallucinogenic giggle and an eerie challenge.

For Stinson, a 28-year-old professional whose studies in photography and sculpture have meshed in an open marriage with the new technology, the trend toward embracing techno-savvy just makes sense. “Technological issues in art are by no means new,” he says of the trend that’s at least as old as he is. “In that way, they will persist. And I think that this media category is a new extension of that.”

What excites Schwager about the movement is the settling that it’s experiencing, as new artists embrace more static media within the spacious confines of technological explorations. For Stinson, the traditional issues remain fascinating. “I’ve been trying to break the rectangle down,” he says simply. “I’m searching for balance between rectangles and circles, and that’s a real old issue, too. I think that sometimes my work is missing the spiritual power of natural shapes.”

“Sound/Image/Object” shows through March 30. SSU Art Gallery, 1801 E. Cotati Ave., Rohnert Park. Hours are Tuesday-Friday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, noon to 4 p.m. Admission is free. 664-2295.

From the March 6-12, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
© 1997 Metrosa, Inc.

Bernice Johnson Reagon

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Bernice Johnson Reagon

Say Amen!


Songs of Freedom: Bernice Johnson Reagon gets spiritual with new Folkways CDs.

Bernice Johnson Reagon shines

By Greg Cahill

ENJOINED BY THE GIFTS of breath . . . we plow the path forward with sound,” Sweet Honey in the Rock founder Bernice Johnson Reagon wrote in the liner notes of that group’s 1993 release Still on the Journey: The 20th Anniversary Album (Earthbeat!). “And it is a path we travel, lit by the chatter of the ancestors.”

The following year, Reagon–one of the most powerful voices in African-American traditional music–chose to leave that Grammy-winning a cappella women’s ensemble. These days, she rarely performs on stage, but is nonetheless paying heed to the “chatter of the ancestors.” And Reagon–a recipient of a 1989 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant”–continues to nurture the rich cultural legacy she first encountered 55 years ago as the Georgia-born daughter of a Baptist preacher, weaned on songs of political struggle closely tied to the lives of Southern blacks during the turbulent ’60s.

As curator emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, Reagon has supervised the release of three important new Smithsonian/Folkways recordings that showcase that connection.

The most ambitious is Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions, a four-CD boxed set released in conjunction with the new Smithsonian Institution traveling exhibition by the same title and curated by Reagon. The 67 tracks–arranged in four volumes devoted to choral spirituals, gospel composers, congregational singers, and community gospel choirs–were culled from Reagon’s 1994 Peabody Award­winning NPR series, for which she served as conceptual producer and host. Reagon also researched, wrote, and edited the extensive historic liner notes for the box set, along with scholar Lisa Brevard.

These soul-stirring selections tell the compelling story of African Americans moving out of slavery and into freedom. Those often highly personal tales, as Reagon describes in the liner notes, are punctuated by the cries, moans, shouts, and hallelujahs “of a people rising and falling as we moved beyond our shackles.”

Quite simply, the collection is one of the finest expressions of American music ever compiled. It traces the evolution of black music from the post­Civil War Reconstruction period–when the Fisk Jubilee Singers began touring to raise money for their landmark black college and became the first internationally renown African-American vocal artists–to the rollicking sacred music of the Bible Way Temple Radio Choir and other community gospel groups.

It is a spirited baptism for aficionados and the uninitiated alike.

The first volume, African American Spirituals: The Concert Traditions–with haunting European-style harmonies and arrangements that serve as a soothing balm to such classic songs as “Wade in the Water,” “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” and “Swing Lo’ Sweet Chariot”–alone is worth the price of admission.

For Sweet Honey in the Rock fans, Give Your Hands to Struggle provides a glimpse into the genesis of that much-heralded group. Originally released in 1975 on Paredon Records, this stunning solo album features Reagon riffing on her own powerful vocals through multitracked harmonies prescient of the arrangements she would soon employ with her vocal ensemble. The songs (including one previously unreleased track) were written at a time when many in the civil rights and anti-war movements had grown disillusioned. They reveal a committed artist fully embracing the marriage of political action and music–and stubbornly refusing to succumb to the apathy that had sprung up around her.

Voices of the Civil Rights Movement: Black American Freedom Songs, 1960-1966 is a two-CD collection showcasing the role African-American musical culture played in shaping the course of the civil rights movement. Reagon, then an activist songleader and a member of the SNCC Freedom Singers, succinctly describes these works as “new music for a changed time.”

Like summer lightning on a humid Georgia night, these highly charged recordings–some made in the field and reflecting the new words and phrases coined in the midst of the volatile Selma marches and other confrontations–literally crackle with fiery passion.

From the March 6-12, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent

This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
© 1997 Metrosa, Inc.

The Scoop

Big News By Bob HarrisTHIS WEEK, the papers are aflutter with a new study from something called the Coalition for Excess Weight Risk Education (now, do they mean the weight's excessive, or the education?), which ranks 33 U.S. cities by the general heftiness of their populace. Their findings? New Orleans should change its nickname to the Big Greasy,...
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Taqueria Santa Rosa

La Familia By Michael HirschbergWITHOUT DOUBT, the success of Sonoma County's wine industry has caused the emergence of many topnotch local restaurants; great wines create a demand for great cuisine. The fame of such local favorites as John Ash, Lisa Hemenway's, and Willowside Cafe (to name only a few) has helped to make our area a mecca...
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Psychedelic Mushrooms

Natural High By Gretchen GilesIN AN INTERVIEW published in the June 1993 issue of New History magazine, Marin author and LSD pioneer Terence McKenna (True Hallucinations) posits that because the human race sprang from the Psilocybe-rich grasslands of Africa, eating the psychedelic mushrooms appearing on dunghills and in the savanna was an early way of life. They were a...
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Cynthia Lamb

Family Secrets The Devil Made Her Do It: Cotati author Cynthia Lamb's new novel traces her heritage.Photo by Joshua B. RostenCynthia Lamb shakes her family tree By Gretchen GilesTALK ABOUT your closet full of skeletons. While some families may admit to an adulterer or two, an attic-bound mad aunt, or the occasional homicidal maniac, Cotati writer...
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Talking Pictures

Booby Prize K.C. BaileyHoward's End: Schlock shock-jock Howard Stern surprises even himself.Author Marilyn Yalom is exposed to Howard Stern's 'Private Parts'By David TempletonWriter David Templeton takes interesting people to interesting movies. This week, he takes noted historian Marilyn Yalom, author of A History of the Breast, to see Howard Stern's Private Parts.MARILYN YALOM, before I invited her to...
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Ezines

'Zine SceneU is for Unusual: Stereolab members answered 'Ultra' zine's alphabetical interview.Online music mags on the riseBy Matt GallowayMICHAEL GOLDBERG would like nothing more than for you to never get another paper cut from a music magazine. In fact, the savvy West Coast entrepreneur and former Rolling Stone scribe would prefer that you never flipped through a conventional...
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Wild Thyme

Spring FlingTo Every Season: Joanne and Keith Filipello display a savory terrine just right for the warmer months.Photo by Janet OrsiWild Thyme caterers have change of season By Gretchen GilesTHIS IS WHAT the good life looks like at 10 a.m. on a drizzly February morning: Three quietly occupied workers peel carrots, sauté leeks, and unpack produce in...
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Youth in Helen Putnam Plaza

Tell No LiesHanging Out: Petaluma teens Alison Anderson, 16, Adam Lovato, 15, and Fred Gray, 15.Photo by Janet OrsiHas the press misled the public about Petaluma youth invading Helen Putnam Plaza? By Paula HarrisA MINIATURE PARK in downtown Petaluma--set with cozy benches, grassy plots, a small fountain, and designed for the enjoyment of everyone--is making no one...
Read more

Sound/Image/Object

Media SavvyJanet OrsiIlluminated Manuscript: Artist Colin Stinson crouches beside his testament to the end of the written word.Emerging artists take up technology By Gretchen GilesAS THE WHITE-NOISE background of high-level technology infiltrates all our lives--the constant demanding buzz of the television, the insistent beep of the fax, the telephone bossily taking its own messages, the sexy intonations...
Read more

Bernice Johnson Reagon

Say Amen!Songs of Freedom: Bernice Johnson Reagon gets spiritual with new Folkways CDs.Bernice Johnson Reagon shinesBy Greg CahillENJOINED BY THE GIFTS of breath . . . we plow the path forward with sound," Sweet Honey in the Rock founder Bernice Johnson Reagon wrote in the liner notes of that group's 1993 release Still on the Journey: The 20th...
Read more
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