Who’s on First

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Who’s on First

When Santa Rosa’s hottest new craft brewery releases a new beer this week, you won’t have to wait in a line that wraps around the block to get a taste of it. You might be challenged to even find the block.

Shady Oak Barrel House occupies an enviably capacious space on a street in Santa Rosa that, despite its high-ranking ordinal number, has been largely forgotten by time and redevelopment. Staunched by the freeway, sandwiched in between the Santa Rosa Creek and the mall, old First Street lives on in a one-block stretch that, incredibly, allowed an upstart, startup brewery to set up a taproom that officially opened for business on Black Friday, 2018.

But I didn’t have any trouble locating the spot, since I’d already been shown in by the side door last fall while on—full disclosure—some business.

Story goes like this: I had some wine grapes hanging on the vines after a first pick and hated to see them go to waste, so I placed an ad for home winemakers. No luck, except for this quirky brewer: Steve Doty wanted some grapes to co-ferment with his wild-yeast-fermented beers.

When I looked around the yard at delivery, I saw no de-stemmer machine, and despaired at how Doty was going to get the grapes off the stems. By hand, he replied. I felt bad for the guy—I’d done this before with maybe 50 pounds of Grenache grapes, and I’d vowed to never, ever do that again. But Doty happily said he’d put on some tunes and bring in some friends, and get it done. Now that’s dedication to the craft. But there’s more.

In the cellar, Doty explained an odd contraption parked there: it’s a coolship, a stainless steel sort of mystery ship that Capt. Doty tows to sites around Sonoma County on still, cool nights during winter—as that’s the best time to capture wild yeast—to create a beer of true terroir. A coolship is a kind of post-brewing trap to acquire all the “bad,” souring yeasts that most modern brewing is dedicated to keeping at bay.

Shady Oak’s current offerings range from a tangy gose to a sweet, floral sour IPA, a bourbon barrel-aged dark sour that speaks of boozy cola, and finally a grainy, not-sour-at-all amber IPA because, as Doty says, “everybody’s got to sell a cheeseburger.”

Shady Oak Barrel House, 420 First St., Santa Rosa. Open Wednesday–Friday, 3–9pm; Saturday–Sunday, noon–9pm. Shady Oak is participating in Santa Rosa Beer Passport FeBREWary celebration, Feb. 1–28. 707.575.7687.

Lifesaver

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Lifesaver

When Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2016, the news was greeted by some with the retort that, if the Swedes were going to go in that direction, they should have given the prize to Joni Mitchell.

It would have been both a smart choice and a sentimental one, given the premature report of Joni’s death to a brain aneurysm in 2015. In recent years, she’s suffered other maladies. The cigs caught up with that crystalline voice, and a mysterious skin condition made her shun daylight.

Yet the party for her in Joni 75: A Birthday Celebration shows both the range of her music and the affection that the world of music has for her.

The concert film compiles a two-night-long show last November at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, the city she analyzed in verse for years.

Not everyone gets Joni Mitchell: the strange guitar tunings, the high blue yodel or the throaty intimacy of her confessional mode. Writing about Mitchell, who was one of only two female performers in 1978’s Last Waltz, Roger Ebert said that he didn’t know what her song “Coyote” was supposed to be about. (It’s easy: it’s about Sam Shepard, or somebody like him.)

While Mitchell’s modes changed, from lissome folkie to thick-skinned blueswoman to jazz artist, one point stayed as constant as a northern star: both in age and in youth, Mitchell insisted on a woman’s privilege of traveling alone, sleeping with whom she pleased and holding firm to independence.

Lyrically, Mitchell’s viewpoint changed from hippie naiveté to embittered realist. If once she thought people were made of stardust, she came to fear they’re all just meat in a dog-eat-dog world, where “sex sells everything / and sex kills.” Always in her songs are diagrams of traps waiting for women. One side is the grim one-night-stand in “Down to You”; the other is a different kind of discontent in “Harry’s House/Centerpiece.” There, Mitchell imagines the Scarsdale angst that could have been hers, lolling around waiting for the husband to return from the indelible cityscape she painted (“A helicopter lands on the Pan Am roof / like a dragonfly on a tomb”).

The concert is something for any Mitchell fan, from tricky jazz to the kind of crowd-pleasing material that any semi-competent street busker can make sound good. Glen Hansard, whose busking style was visible in the movie Once, does “Coyote” here. (Maybe the sainted Ebert would have understood the lyrics if a man sang them?)

Graham Nash sings “Our House,” about the Laurel Canyon place he and Joni shared once upon a time. Mitchell’s fellow Canadian Diana Krall covers perhaps the bleakest song Mitchell ever did, “Amelia,” about a woman’s search for freedom, what it costs and what it’s worth. James Taylor and Seal collaborate on a tune I cannot abide, “Woodstock”; if it seems particularly airy-fairy, remember that Mitchell actually didn’t play the Woodstock fest.

The vocally craggy Kris Kristofferson takes on “A Case of You” with Brandi Carlile, right before Carlile solos to cover “Down to You,” a startling sound-alike version of a very complicated song. Emmylou Harris (the other woman in The Last Waltz) covers Mitchell’s terrifying slide-guitar lament about heroin, “Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire.” Los Lobos perform the obscure but fine “Nothing Can Be Done.” The congas in the original must have attracted the Wolves.

Making a rare appearance, but not joining in on the music, is Mitchell herself. Buffeted by the years, she’s still everything Chaka Khan calls her here: a lifesaver.

Double Exposure

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Double Exposure

There they are, waiting for you. Super-models and Instagram vixens splashing in the Caribbean with the famous swimming hogs of Big Major Cay. Maybe they should have called it the Circe Festival instead of the Fyre Festival. The swindled victims weren’t literally turned to swine. But they weren’t treated much better than pigs.

Most of the world knows what happened, and moreover has had a real good laugh at it. The dueling documentaries Fyre Fraud (Hulu) by Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason, and Chris Smith’s Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened (Netflix) take slightly different stances on the dreadful fest.

Both tell of how Jersey go-getter Billy McFarland made his name by selling the Magnises credit card to millenials, with a $250 annual fee. There were certain club benefits, disputed by the two docs; Netflix’s doc admires the Magnises lounge and club nights. The Hulu version snipes that the Magnises bennies were getting to rub shoulders with guys from Murray Hill, one of NYC’s most boring neighborhoods.

These Magnises (was it meant to be short for “Magnificent Penis”?) got McFarland got enough fame in the right places to fund the development of a band-booking ap called Fyre. It was to be promoted with an awesome music festival on a private Caribbean island in spring 2017. Rapper Ja Rule endorsed it to give it street cred. McFarland hired PR, which in turn used “Influencers”—professional inducers of online FOMO.

Everything went wrong. There was inadequate prep time, several changes of location, a surprise rainstorm and the especially bad idea to have the fest during a regatta weekend when there was no rental properties available. The elite arrived to find used disaster relief tents waiting for them, with windows that didn’t keep out the mosquitoes. They rushed back to the states, complaining into their iPhones every step of the way.

There’s more than a little overlap between these documentaries—both featuring the same viral video showing Ja Rule chased by the schoolboys from Lord of the Flies. The Netflix account, in which Vice media participated, has the most scandalous material: event planner Andy King tells of how McFarland begged him to fellate a certain Bahamian minister to get a planeload of Evian water released from customs’ duties.

Hulu’s Fyre Fraud has personal access to McFarland—in fact, the producers paid him to talk—when the grifter was on bail and secretly cooking yet more scams. Here we get childhood legends of McFarland’s hustling youth from his mom, in communications hilariously read out loud by text-to-speech software.

If Netflix’s Fyre:TGFTNH is more fair, it’s less fun. The title says it all—it doesn’t question the necessity of the fest. The Fyre Festival didn’t work, but wouldn’t it have been insanely cool if it had? Marc Weinstein, one of McFarland’s assistants who is still on hook for some of the unpaid wages, still argues “there was definitely a chance to pull it all together.” Thus Netflix’s Fyre:TGFTNH may be a stepping stone to the inevitable exculpatory whitewashing feature film with Jonah Hill or Leonardo Dicaprio playing McFarland. It’s inevitable, an on-screen pity party for a showman who dreamed too big.

By contrast, Hulu’s Fyre Fraud suggests a larger picture, in it’s account of how McFarland’s scams were hot air sucked up and made forceful by the Venturi effect of the internet envy-machine. One prefer Fyre Fraud’s sense in exploring the sleaziness of McFarland’s dream, with supermodels jiggling in slow-mo, posing and grinning—images that are, to borrow critic David Thomson’s phrase, “an advertisement for advertisement.”

It’s not going out into the weeds to suggest that this mirage called the Fyre Festival mirrored the way America fell for a charismatic figure, who cared less for truth than what his guts tell him. Was the Fyre Festival a merry distraction from the Trumpster Fyre, or do they parallel each other?

Fyre Fraud convincingly identifies the fraud-fest as just one more chimera of modern times, a 24 hour game of ‘let’s pretend,’ in which one cannot tell if someone is a delusional liar or the smartest person in the room.

Cal Fire: Tubbs caused by private electric system, not PG&E

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Cal Fire: Tubbs caused by private electric system, not PG&E

Cal Fire issued a statement and report today identifying a private power system—and not PG&E—as being the culprit in the deadly 2017 wildfire. Sen. Bill Dodd released a statement of his own saying that the Cal Fire finding shows that everyone needs to up their fire-prevention game in the “new normal.” For PG&E this is a rare bit of good news; the utility was found to be the culprit in a dozen of the 2017 fires that swept through California and has recently been swept up in bankruptcy talk over its estimated $30 billion insurance exposure associated with the fires. Here’s the press release from Cal Fire and a link to their investigation:

Sacramento – After an extensive and thorough investigation, CAL FIRE has determined the Tubbs Fire, which occurred during the October 2017 Fire Siege, was caused by a private electrical system adjacent to a residential structure. CAL FIRE investigators did not identify any violations of state law, Public Resources Code, related to the cause of this fire.

The Tubbs Fire in Sonoma County started on the evening of October 8th, 2017 and burned a total of 36,807 acres. Destroying 5,636 structures and resulting in 22 civilian fatalities and one firefighter injury.

In total, the October 2017 Fire Siege involved more than 170 fires and burned at least 245,000 acres in Northern California. Approximately 11,000 firefighters from 17 states and Australia helped battle the blazes.

CAL FIRE investigators are dispatched with the initial attack resources to the wildfires in CAL FIRE jurisdiction and immediately begin working to determine their origin and cause.

Californians must remain vigilant and take on the responsibility to be prepared for wildfire at any time throughout the year. For more information on how to be prepared, visit www.readyforwildfire.org or www.fire.ca.gov.

Link to the redacted Tubbs Fire Investigation Report here:

http://calfire.ca.gov/fire_protection/fire_protection_2017_siege

Jan. 24: Return to Roots in Rohnert Park

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Jan. 24: Return to Roots in Rohnert Park

Musician and vocalist Martha Redbone is a melting-pot performer of American Roots music who often conjures up images of blue-collar workers and small-town values. Now Redbone looks to her own roots in a new theatrical experience, “Bone Hill: The Concert,” that mixes her father’s gospel voice and her Cherokee/Choctaw mother’s culture in a show about a young woman returning to the Kentucky coal mines of her youth to explore a rarely seen piece of American history. Redbone performs in concert on Thursday, Jan. 24, at Green Music Center, 1801 E. Cotati Ave., Rohnert Park. 7:30pm. $25 and up. 866.955.6040.

Jan. 25: Field Notes in Occidental

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Jan. 25: Field Notes in Occidental

Cannes award-winning filmmaker Rob Nilsson (Northern Lights) is in the North Bay to present a remarkable series of short documentaries—Prairie Fire, Survivor and Rebel Earth—that makeup ‘The Prairie Trilogy.’ The trilogy of films tells the story of North Dakota’s Socialist Nonpartisan League, who fought a hard-won battle in 1916 to regain voting rights that had been taken from them by those in power. See the three short docs and engage in a discussion on the films’ continued relevance in our current political climate on Friday, Jan. 25, at Occidental Center for the Arts, 3850 Doris Murphy Court, Occidental. 7pm. Free. 707.874.9392.

Jan. 26: Parks Art in Petaluma

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Jan. 26: Parks Art in Petaluma

Sonoma County artist and gallery owner Mary Fassbinder spent over three years and traveled more than 70,000 miles to create her latest collection of paintings. Now she displays her works in a new exhibit, ‘The National Parks Painting Project,’ that features dozens of plein air paintings of each of the U.S. National Parks. Showcasing the vast natural beauty in the United States, this timely show aims to promote preservation and conservation of the country’s resources. Running through March, “The National Parks Painting Project” opens with a reception on Saturday, Jan. 26, at Petaluma Arts Center, 230 Lakeville St., Petaluma. 5pm. Free. 707.762.5600.

Jan. 27: Fire Patrol in Santa Rosa

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Jan. 27: Fire Patrol in Santa Rosa

The devastating Tubbs fire sparked many heartfelt stories in 2017, but few are as wild and inspiring as the story of the Pointe Patrol, in which nine residents of Fountaingrove’s Viewpointe Circle snuck back to their homes to save their neighborhood from fires and looting. Local author Earik Beann recounts the ordeal in a new book, Pointe Patrol, which he reads from and signs to help raise money for fire victims and families of fallen first responders on Sunday, Jan. 27, at Copperfield’s Books, 775 Village Court, Santa Rosa. 1:30pm. Free. 707.578.8938.

The Power to Protect

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The Power to Protect

Hey you, Mr. Big Shot. You know who you are. You get off on power and accumulating wealth and feeling important and successful. Por favor: do me a favor. It could change your life. Take a little child in your arms. If it’s your own kid, all the better, but if not, borrow a little dude.

Take the child in your arms. Hold it close. Feel its tiny heart beat against your chest. Don’t be afraid.

Give your head a rest from Dow Jones or that Rolex watch that graces your wrist. What’s that you say? “It’s starting to drool over my expensive suit. Someone take the kid back!” No way, buddy. You need to spend some time at this. The drool comes with the territory.

Look at its tiny fingers; feel the soft, perfect skin. Yeah, you’re a guy, but you’re a human being. Let yourself go soft and squishy for a moment. See how vulnerable this little dude is? Wow! The protector in you is calling from the depth of your belly. Mama and Papa Bear are one.

You feel for the moment almost godlike power—power mixed with weakness and vulnerability. You hold in your arms all that matters most in life (even more than the beemer in your garage).

You are transformed into the person who is both lover and loved, the kind of man you really want to be.

And the trust. Good Lord, we are so afraid to trust anyone anymore, but this little child trusts you. The baby trusts you, weak and flawed human being that you are. Suddenly, from deep within you comes the power that only trust and love can bring you. You will use your power to protect and defend the little dudes in the world. They trust you.

Now you can let the child in your arms go to someone else. What’s that you say? You want to cuddle it just a little longer? Yeah, I was hoping that would happen. Kids have a way of reaching you, don’t they? Way more than the latest “stuff” you accumulate. You go, dude. Love ya!

Hank Mattimore lives in Windsor.

Letters to the Editor: January 22, 2019

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Letters to the Editor: January 22, 2019

Too Many Vineyards

Since the October fires, I have read periodicals and listened to the news regarding accounts of the catastrophic fires and the tragic aftermath, but nowhere has there been any mention of water use by the wine industry. Vineyard owners sink wells hundreds of feet into aquifers, divert water from rivers, streams, creeks, and seem not to care about how their practices affect the environment. If wineries keep extracting groundwater and diverting water from natural sources, the environment will become drier leading to more extensive, catastrophic fires than the North Bay fire.

Since so many people have to start over, it is time for people involved in the wine industry to become introspective, to take a long, hard look at their practices and change them in a way that respects people, animals and the natural world—it’s time for the wine industry to be accountable to the people who live in Sonoma County and to stop catering to tourists.

While I understand that the county needs the revenue that is generated by the wine industry, too much is too much. Too many vineyards, wineries, tasting rooms, event centers. Too many mountains, hills, woodlands, meadows and fields destroyed in order to plant grapes. Too many animals dead on our roads because what once was their habitat is fenced off to protect vineyards. Too much traffic and inebriated people driving county roads that they do not know.

Due to the tragic fires, thousands of people have lost homes, belongings, businesses and animals, so I say to the people in the wine industry, “Slow down.” People in this county are suffering and will be in shock for a while. Nothing is normal in Sonoma County, and no one will ever be the same. We are a changed people. Please change your winery practices to something that involves the whole, not just the few.

—Pamela Singer

Occidental

Who’s on First

When Santa Rosa's hottest new craft brewery releases a new beer this week, you won't have to wait in a line that wraps around the block to get a taste of it. You might be challenged to even find the block. Shady Oak Barrel House occupies an enviably capacious space on a street in Santa Rosa that, despite its high-ranking...
Read more

Lifesaver

When Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2016, the news was greeted by some with the retort that, if the Swedes were going to go in that direction, they should have given the prize to Joni Mitchell. It would have been both a smart choice and a sentimental one, given the premature report of Joni's death to...
Read more

Double Exposure

Failed Fyre Festival gets taken down by competing Netflix and Hulu documentaries.
Read more

Cal Fire: Tubbs caused by private electric system, not PG&E

Cal Fire issued a statement and report today identifying a private power system—and not PG&E—as being the culprit in the deadly 2017 wildfire. Sen. Bill Dodd released a statement of his own saying that the Cal Fire finding shows that everyone needs to up their fire-prevention game in the "new normal." For PG&E this is...
Read more

Jan. 24: Return to Roots in Rohnert Park

Musician and vocalist Martha Redbone is a melting-pot performer of American Roots music who often conjures up images of blue-collar workers and small-town values. Now Redbone looks to her own roots in a new theatrical experience, “Bone Hill: The Concert,” that mixes her father’s gospel voice and her Cherokee/Choctaw mother’s culture in a show about a young woman returning...
Read more

Jan. 25: Field Notes in Occidental

Cannes award-winning filmmaker Rob Nilsson (Northern Lights) is in the North Bay to present a remarkable series of short documentaries—Prairie Fire, Survivor and Rebel Earth—that makeup ‘The Prairie Trilogy.’ The trilogy of films tells the story of North Dakota’s Socialist Nonpartisan League, who fought a hard-won battle in 1916 to regain voting rights that had been taken from them...
Read more

Jan. 26: Parks Art in Petaluma

Sonoma County artist and gallery owner Mary Fassbinder spent over three years and traveled more than 70,000 miles to create her latest collection of paintings. Now she displays her works in a new exhibit, ‘The National Parks Painting Project,’ that features dozens of plein air paintings of each of the U.S. National Parks. Showcasing the vast natural beauty in...
Read more

Jan. 27: Fire Patrol in Santa Rosa

The devastating Tubbs fire sparked many heartfelt stories in 2017, but few are as wild and inspiring as the story of the Pointe Patrol, in which nine residents of Fountaingrove’s Viewpointe Circle snuck back to their homes to save their neighborhood from fires and looting. Local author Earik Beann recounts the ordeal in a new book, Pointe Patrol, which...
Read more

The Power to Protect

Hey you, Mr. Big Shot. You know who you are. You get off on power and accumulating wealth and feeling important and successful. Por favor: do me a favor. It could change your life. Take a little child in your arms. If it's your own kid, all the better, but if not, borrow a little dude. Take the child in...
Read more

Letters to the Editor: January 22, 2019

Too Many Vineyards Since the October fires, I have read periodicals and listened to the news regarding accounts of the catastrophic fires and the tragic aftermath, but nowhere has there been any mention of water use by the wine industry. Vineyard owners sink wells hundreds of feet into aquifers, divert water from rivers, streams, creeks, and seem not to care...
Read more
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