The Man and the Mirror

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The Man and the Mirror

A season of evil clown sightings (apocryphal?) culminates in the election of the Ultimate Evil Clown as president, with a minority of the popular vote—or is this more fake news?

Alas, it’s far too facile to demonize the Donald, as he’s done to far too many others. Ironic, since we’re talking about a real estate developer when nobody is home. For, certainly, Trump is a media creation, a soul-sucking vacuum that somehow has found a way to channel the anti-matter from some bizarre black hole back into our dimension.

How has he achieved this? Trump’s only power is that he holds up a mirror and reflects back our contemporary culture. Trump is—and we are—materialistic, more concerned with appearances than reality. (If we’re not rich, we fake it. Isn’t Miley worth more than Trump?) Egotistic? Narcissistic!

Like Trump, we are in love with ourselves, and, self-promoters all, more than happy to share our love with the world. The dominion of technology in our lives has given every evil clown (or wounded clown, if you prefer) a pulpit. Everyone and anyone who wants to play with people’s heads is connected. Experts all!

You can’t tell me anything more than you can tell Trump! Yet somehow I remain oblivious to anything other than the little screen I hold in my hand as I walk out into traffic, or the little screen I watch as I’m driving and nearly hit the guy walking out into traffic watching his little screen. What was I saying?

The tweeting president—even the Donald is a poet. Just when you thought rap and hip-hop were really finally dead, now comes along the greatest white rapper in the valley. Eminem who? And like many other rappers, Trump has no problem claiming more for himself than is necessarily so. Like Bill Cosby, that paragon of moral virtue we once called “America’s Dad,” we now stand on the verge of calling Donald Trump president? Look at the person in the mirror and ask, is this the image I want to project out into the world?

Poet and novelist David Madgalene lives in Windsor.

Open Mic is a weekly feature in the ‘Bohemian.’ We welcome your contribution. To have your topical essay of 350 words considered for publication, write op*****@******an.com.

Hark!

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Hark!

I don’t know much, but I know I love Aaron Neville. The soul man with the voice of an angel has been topping charts for 50 years, garnering praise for his melodic R&B hits of the 1960s and ’70s, and is loved by many for his duets with Linda Ronstadt in the ’80s and pop singles in the ’90s.

At 75 years old, Neville has still got it. He appears on Dec. 17 at the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts in Santa Rosa for an evening of Christmas songs, a tradition for the past several years. It’s safe to say that Christmas is Neville’s favorite holiday, but like most other things in his life, he’s all about the music.

“My mom and dad were fans of Nat King Cole and Perry Como, so I grew up listening to all their Christmas albums,” Neville says.

Born and raised in New Orleans, Neville started singing with brothers Art and Charles in a doo-wop group when he was seven years old. He says his uniquely measured falsetto voice came out naturally, though he refined it through listening to a variety of music.

“I listened to all the doo-woppers, but also all the country singers like Hank Williams and George Jones,” he says. “I love all of it.”

In his career, Neville has delved into soul, funk and R&B, as well as gospel, adult contemporary and jazz. He even has two holiday albums, 1993’s

Aaron Neville’s Soulful Christmas and 2005’s Christmas Prayer, both of which feature him covering such classics as “Silent Night” and traditional spiritual hymns like “Go Tell It on the Mountain.”

This past summer, Neville released one of the strongest solo albums of his career, the swaggering and soulful Apache, on his own Tell It record label.

“I’ve been writing poems on my iPhone for years,” he says, “and it’s been on my mind that I wanted to put music to some of my poetry.”

Neville wrote or co-wrote all the tracks on Apache. Through the songs, he relives his youth in New Orleans, while also penning some of his most heartfelt love songs ever. Musically, he sets the mood with gritty funk and soulful R&B grooves throughout.

“It was a labor of love,” he says.

For the upcoming performance, Neville will be mixing favorite Christmas tunes with new material and classic hits.

“I’m looking forward to seeing our fans,” he says. “We’re going to give them a great show.”

Watch Rainbow Girls Perform “The Folk Singer’s Contract” in New Orleans

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[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFtPA_UgweA[/youtube]
Sonoma County folk group Rainbow Girls are making some of the North Bay’s most heartbreaking acoustic harmonies these days. Last spring, they drove this hardened reporter to tears during a performance at the Next Level showcase in Santa Rosa, and they continue to do so with their new batch of tunes, set to be released on the upcoming album American Dream early next year.
Such is the case with “The Folk Singer’s Contract,” a wistful rumination on a tangled web of a relationship. The above video of the song was recorded live along the New Orleans waterfront on a recent trip. Supported by gentle waves in the background, the trio shows off their vocal chops and emotional resonance on the new song. Just be prepared to grab a tissue for your tears.
In January, Rainbow Girls are taking the new songs on the road for a “Backwoods Tour” with soulful folk singer Caitlin Jemma that takes them from Bolinas to San Diego. Click here to see their upcoming dates and keep your eyes and ears peeled for news of American Dream‘s release.

Listen to Trebuchet’s New Single, “A Confession”

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trebuchetPetaluma folk-rock quartet Trebuchet are finally out of the studio and ready to start unveiling their new sophomore album, Volte-Face, due out early next year. First up, Trebuchet premieres the album’s lead single, “A Confession,” which finds vocalist and songwriter Eliott Whitehurst delving deep into family memories and bringing back with him a questioning spirit.
Bolstered by harmonies from drummer Paul Haile, keyboardist Lauren Haile and bassist Navid Manoochehri, Whitehurst’s newfound lyrical longing is brought to life with slow-building acoustics expanding into a mellifluous choir. If “A Confession” is any indicator, Volte-Face looks to be a mature and introspective reckoning of an album.
Listen to the new single below, and see Trebuchet play a release show on Sunday, Dec 11, at Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco. That show also features new Bay Area band Mare Island, featuring members of Loma Prieta and The New Trust, and all proceeds will go to a benefit fundraiser for the victims of the recent Oakland warehouse fire. Next week, on Dec 18, Trebuchet plays their annual “A Very Trebuchet Christmas” concert in Petaluma, featuring them and several other North Bay acts performing Christmas covers and more.

Dec. 9: He’s Spartacus in San Rafael

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Dec. 9: He’s Spartacus in San Rafael

On Dec. 9, Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas turns 100 years old. That’s something to celebrate, and the Smith Rafael Film Center is doing just that with a Happy Hundred week of Douglas’ most iconic films. The party kicks off on Friday with Douglas as Vincent van Gogh in Lust for Life and a WWI officer in Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory. Other films on the schedule include Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which features a behind-the-scenes presentation from Oscar winners Ben Burtt and Craig Barron as part of their “Cinema Archeologists” series, and a newly restored print of Spartacus. The films screen Friday through Thursday, Dec. 9–15, at the Smith Rafael Film Center, 1118 Fourth St., San Rafael. Times and prices vary. 415.454.1222.

Dec. 10: Rock History in Santa Rosa

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Dec. 10: Rock History in Santa Rosa

Thoughts of 1960s hippie counterculture and psychedelic rock and roll immediately bring to mind San Francisco’s famous Haight Ashbury district. Yet the entire Bay Area, and especially the North Bay, was a hotbed of free love and loud music back then. This week, a new exhibit retraces the steps of the North Bay’s 1960s experience through artifacts, photographs and artwork from the era. ‘The Beat Goes On’ opens with a reception featuring live music by Sonoma County guitarist Matthew Mendosa on Saturday, Dec. 10, at the History Museum of Sonoma County, 425 Seventh St., Santa Rosa. 5pm. $15; free for museum members. 707.579.1500.

Dec. 10: Global Diva in Rohnert Park

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Dec. 10: Global Diva in Rohnert Park

Born in the small West African country of Benin, singer and songwriter Angélique Kidjo was already a star throughout Africa before she studied in Paris and signed a major label deal in New York City. Her acclaimed world-music repertoire includes Afrobeat, reggae, gospel and jazz styles, and she’s a three-time Grammy Award winner who was also on the cover of Forbes’ “Most Influential Women in the World” issue last year. Angélique Kidjo arrives in the North Bay to perform her world of sound on Saturday, Dec. 10, at the Green Music Center, 1801 East Cotati Ave., Rohnert Park. 7:30pm. $25 and up. 866.955.6040.

Dec. 11: Christmas Pops in Santa Rosa

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Dec. 11: Christmas Pops in Santa Rosa

Christmas just isn’t Christmas without the classic animated “Peanuts” special A Charlie Brown Christmas. This weekend, the Santa Rosa Symphony once again presents songs from the classic with the Symphony Pops: A Charlie Brown Christmas Concert. Conductor Michael Berkowitz returns to lead this treasured tradition, featuring pianist Jim Martinez and his quartet filling in for Schroeder alongside the symphony. Get to the show early to hear Berkowitz talk about the concert and swap stories from his illustrious career. The show pops off on Sunday, Dec. 11, at the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts, 50 Mark West Springs Road, Santa Rosa. 3pm; talk at 2pm. $37 and up. 707.546.3600.

Death Wish

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Death Wish

Watching Nocturnal Animals is like watching a Charles Bronson retrospective inside a plush, red-velvet-wrapped salon in some minor European city’s film festival. The trappings give aesthetic importance to what’s going on up front, which isn’t really that different from a Golan-Globus rape-revenge shocker.

Celebrities turn up (including Michael Sheen and Laura Linney) to validate the significance of what we’re watching. We’re presumed to find the framing by photographer-turned-director-turned-back-to-photographer Tom Ford positively Lynchian, as though we’re meant to be captives on rides on lost highways. But there’s only one David Lynch, and imitating him is a sucker’s game.

Amy Adams is Susan, a woman between two marriages, as it were: one to a blue chip art dealer (Armie Hammer), who has had enough of her, the other to failed novelist Edward Sheffield (Jake Gyllenhaal), whom she sloughed off for his lack of ambition.

This bird in a gilded cage—or, rather, this bird in a $5 million concrete modernist bunker with an apparently motor-oil-filled swimming pool out back—receives Sheffield’s new novel in galley form. It’s a potboiler’s potboiler about a remote Texas road trip, a trio of rapacious hillbillies and an indomitable lawman (Michael Shannon) named Andes, just like the mountains, who goes beyond the law to track down the criminals.

Is Susan’s obsession with the book, and her numbness to everything else, due to the fact that she was a victim in the real version of the fictionalized story Sheffield unfolds? Answer is, who cares?

Under layers of makeup that a Japanese geisha might protest against as too much, Adams and her cohorts live a life of blood-freezing affluence. Their clothes are more alive than they are. Ford’s cloudscapes, perhaps surpassing the fraught cumulus clouds in a Michael Mann film, hover ominously. A shot of Los Angeles palm trees in a dirty mist makes them look like they’re smoldering. The most interesting scenes in this movie, in fact, have no people in them.

No matter how insufferably gussied, Nocturnal Animals is standard rape-revenge. Ford doesn’t miss a trick, from long cat-and-mousing by hillbillies to a cornered rapist telling the avenger that he doesn’t have the guts to pull the trigger.

A touch of abortion-remorse is the cherry on this cupcake. Still, Shannon is so damned good and dirty that he keeps the film from dying of its own fanciness.

‘Nocturnal Animals’ is playing at Summerfield Cinemas,
551 Summerfield Road, Santa Rosa; 707.522.0719.

Farm to Bong

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Farm to Bong

I’m probably dating myself, but as a kid I remember going to the mall at Christmastime and seeing those festive Hickory Farms gift packages, the ones with beef sticks, salami, smoked cheeses and little strawberry candies all tucked into a bed of fake grass. Remember those?

That’s what I thought of when I saw the Natural Cannabis Company’s California Farmer’s Showcase Best of Harvest Box. Only, as you might guess, the grass in the package is anything but artificial.

The gift box features 28 strains of cannabis in little one-gram canisters—one ounce. For the weed connoisseur, it’s a treasure chest. The grid of jars in the box corresponds to little blurbs about the properties of the herbs and the mom-and-pop farms that grew each strain.

“The Farmer’s Showcase collection was created to give more exposure to some of the small, local farmers that Natural Cannabis Company partners with,” writes Kerry Quintiliani, company spokesperson, in an email. “With cannabis legalization a reality, many people fear that small farms will be destroyed, along with people’s livelihoods. Dona Frank, founder and owner of Natural Cannabis Company, intends to make sure that doesn’t happen. The company works with more than 200 small farms and artisan cultivators annually.”

Quintiliani says the target customers are people who “truly appreciate high-quality products, akin to wine or cigar enthusiasts.” But leaving aside the quality of any of the cannabis, what strikes me most about the product is that it offers a glimpse into the growth of the recreational cannabis industry. The farm-to-bong era is here.

The description of farms in the box pulls back the veil on the hitherto hidden world of growers. There’s Zsa Zsa Gardens in Sonoma Valley, organic producers of the “amethyst rose” indica/sativa hybrid. Ever heard of Glen Tucky Family Farm on Sonoma Mountain? Me neither. They are biodynamic growers who produce “limited production, high-quality, mountain grown cannabis” like “pre-98,” an indica strain. That sounds like a description of any number of mountain winegrowers.

Mendocino County’s McNabb Cannabis grows the “memberberry diesel” indica/sativa hybrid “above the biodynamic vineyards of Bonterra wine.” I wonder when vineyards will start adding in a few rows of cannabis, if some aren’t doing that already.

The box sells for $190, but you can’t get it at the mall—at least not yet. It’s available at Natural Cannabis Company’s locations in Santa Rosa, Hopland and Oakland. Go to naturalcannabis.com for more info.

The Man and the Mirror

A season of evil clown sightings (apocryphal?) culminates in the election of the Ultimate Evil Clown as president, with a minority of the popular vote—or is this more fake news? Alas, it's far too facile to demonize the Donald, as he's done to far too many others. Ironic, since we're talking about a real estate developer when nobody is home....
Read more

Hark!

I don't know much, but I know I love Aaron Neville. The soul man with the voice of an angel has been topping charts for 50 years, garnering praise for his melodic R&B hits of the 1960s and '70s, and is loved by many for his duets with Linda Ronstadt in the '80s and pop singles in the '90s. At...
Read more

Watch Rainbow Girls Perform “The Folk Singer’s Contract” in New Orleans

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFtPA_UgweA Sonoma County folk group Rainbow Girls are making some of the North Bay's most heartbreaking acoustic harmonies these days. Last spring, they drove this hardened reporter to tears during a performance at the Next Level showcase in Santa Rosa, and they continue to do so with their new batch of tunes, set to be released on the upcoming album American Dream early...
Read more

Listen to Trebuchet’s New Single, “A Confession”

Petaluma folk-rock quartet Trebuchet are finally out of the studio and ready to start unveiling their new sophomore album, Volte-Face, due out early next year. First up, Trebuchet premieres the album's lead single, "A Confession," which finds vocalist and songwriter Eliott Whitehurst delving deep into family memories and bringing back with him a questioning spirit. Bolstered by harmonies from drummer Paul...
Read more

Dec. 9: He’s Spartacus in San Rafael

On Dec. 9, Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas turns 100 years old. That’s something to celebrate, and the Smith Rafael Film Center is doing just that with a Happy Hundred week of Douglas’ most iconic films. The party kicks off on Friday with Douglas as Vincent van Gogh in Lust for Life and a WWI officer in Stanley Kubrick’s Paths...
Read more

Dec. 10: Rock History in Santa Rosa

Thoughts of 1960s hippie counterculture and psychedelic rock and roll immediately bring to mind San Francisco’s famous Haight Ashbury district. Yet the entire Bay Area, and especially the North Bay, was a hotbed of free love and loud music back then. This week, a new exhibit retraces the steps of the North Bay’s 1960s experience through artifacts, photographs and...
Read more

Dec. 10: Global Diva in Rohnert Park

Born in the small West African country of Benin, singer and songwriter Angélique Kidjo was already a star throughout Africa before she studied in Paris and signed a major label deal in New York City. Her acclaimed world-music repertoire includes Afrobeat, reggae, gospel and jazz styles, and she’s a three-time Grammy Award winner who was also on the cover...
Read more

Dec. 11: Christmas Pops in Santa Rosa

Christmas just isn’t Christmas without the classic animated “Peanuts” special A Charlie Brown Christmas. This weekend, the Santa Rosa Symphony once again presents songs from the classic with the Symphony Pops: A Charlie Brown Christmas Concert. Conductor Michael Berkowitz returns to lead this treasured tradition, featuring pianist Jim Martinez and his quartet filling in for Schroeder alongside the symphony....
Read more

Death Wish

Watching Nocturnal Animals is like watching a Charles Bronson retrospective inside a plush, red-velvet-wrapped salon in some minor European city's film festival. The trappings give aesthetic importance to what's going on up front, which isn't really that different from a Golan-Globus rape-revenge shocker. Celebrities turn up (including Michael Sheen and Laura Linney) to validate the significance of what we're watching....
Read more

Farm to Bong

I'm probably dating myself, but as a kid I remember going to the mall at Christmastime and seeing those festive Hickory Farms gift packages, the ones with beef sticks, salami, smoked cheeses and little strawberry candies all tucked into a bed of fake grass. Remember those? That's what I thought of when I saw the Natural Cannabis Company's California Farmer's...
Read more
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