Page 955 – Bohemian | Sonoma & Napa Counties

When Trees Get Saved

News

Nicolas Grizzle

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Mar 6, 2013

Preservation Ranch will officially be preserved. As announced last week, a conservation group will purchase the 20,000-acre plot of forest in northwestern Sonoma County, effectively derailing a much-contested plan to clear-cut the land for vineyard development.

The total purchase price for the property is reportedly $24.5 million, $4 million less than the $28.5 million purchase price in 2004.

Leading the purchase is Virginia-based charity the Conservation Fund, which contributed $6 million to the sale. (The California Coastal Conservancy put in up to $10 million and Sonoma County’s Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District ponied up as much as $4 million in addition to the Sonoma Land Trust’s portion.)

For the past eight years, the $253 billion state employees’ pension fund CalPERS controlled the land and backed a proposal to cut down over 1,700 acres of forest for vineyards, set aside 15,000 acres to sell as lumber and use 2,700 acres as a wildlife preserve. As recently as February of last year, officials said the plan to develop the land had not changed.

The purchase not only helps birds, squirrels, raccoons and would-be competing wineries, but it clears a looming political cloud from Sonoma County supervisor Efren Carrillo’s future career. A possible vote on the plan by the Board of Supervisors would have put him in a tough spot, having to choose between his environmental-leaning constituency and helping political mentors and campaign fundraisers with direct ties to the project. He had not taken a stance on the issue—and now, surely much to his relief, he’s off the hot seat.

Letters to the Editor: March5, 2013

Letters to the Editor

Bohemian.com

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Mar 6, 2013

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Express Mail

I am a letter carrier and NALC shop steward in Sonoma. I just wanted to contact you about your article this week, because there are so many people getting it wrong (“A First-Class Institution,” Feb. 20). It is refreshing to see that someone gets it and, indeed, reported it correctly. Thank you so much for this article. I am reposting it everywhere! If I wasn’t an avid reader before, you guys got me hooked now.

Thanks again for fighting the fight for the little guys. It means so much.

—Paul Arguello

Sonoma

To Hell with the NRA

Having had a few years membership in the NRA, I finally decided to just say no to the BS and quit them (“American Psychos,” Dec. 26). All they want is more money. I asked them why didn’t they ask Bush and Cheney for a few million after they walked out with over $11 billion in war profits from their watch.

I do own a collection of semiautomatic rifles and WWII combat rifles that are not for hunting. I like to go out and burn off a few clips, and I do keep the weapons for self-protection. I hunted a lot as a boy until a tour in Vietnam, which caused me to swear to never take another life, be it animal or human, unless it was to save a life—mine or another’s.

I served as a federal law enforcement officer for some years and never fired my arms once while on duty. I was with a fellow officer who shot an unarmed man carrying a surveyors stake he was carving on to make a play sword for his little boy. Officially, on record, the guy charged the trigger-happy officer with a sword. The shooter was exonerated from any charges as it was a clean shooting, even though the victim was not wanted on any warrant.

I’ll wager money most hunters aren’t members of the NRA. We all cannot be John Wayne or Rambo. But some of us did serve our country, and experienced what a firearm can do to another human being. I still have nightmares about it. To blame Obama for all the firearms sold to Mexico is a joke. It is a no-brainer that firearms dealers on the borders of Texas and Arizona are the real blame. But, hey, don’t go there—it’s all about American free enterprise, right?

—Nomad Nomlaki

Covelo

Something Rotten

Regarding the redwood trees along Highway 101 cut down and sold by Ghilotti Construction for a profit (“Deadwood Hwy.,” Jan. 30), just because something is legal doesn’t make it right. Legality is a cop-out for when something smells bad and feels wrong. If it looks bad and smells bad, then there is something in there that’s rotten. Trust your nose.

Those trees belonged to the public, period. What their value is relative to the size of the project does not diminish their importance, nor does it diminish the stench, public or private.

—Alejandro Moreno S.

Via online

Duhhh!

Re: Daniel Garcia’s reply to my recent letter (“Cool Down, Man,” Feb. 13), those who try to argue against truth always resort to cheap tactics. They make up “facts” and they hurl personal insults. Thus does Mr. Garcia, in emulation of the moronic name calling that Limbaugh, Hannity, et al., like to spew at Obama.

Of course I voted for Obama over Romney—duhhh!—but that doesn’t mean I’ll give him or any other big-time decider a pass for persisting in a covetous, murderous, ruinous agenda that benefits only the profiteers of the war machine.

Too bad the last, most important sentence of my letter was chopped for space: “As long as we pursue client ways elsewhere, we can count on incurring more of the same on home soil.” Via retaliation or karma. It’s inevitable. World History 101 says it all.

Mr. Garcia might do well to read “The Force,” in the Jan. 28 New Yorker. Or he might gain some perspective the way I did, by serving four years in the U.S. Marine Corps. Nothing beats a scarlet and gold hanky for wiping the Gerber off one’s face.

—J. B. Grant

Sebastopol

Write to us at le*****@******an.com.

Short and Sweet

Theater

David Templeton

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Mar 6, 2013

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“If you’ve ever been in the theater,” says Paul Draper, acting department director at Sonoma State University, “and halfway through you thought, ‘I don’t really like this play’ . . . well, in the One-Page Play Extravaganza, if you don’t like a play, just wait three minutes and you’ll see a different play.”

Last year, Draper invited students and faculty of SSU to contemplate the concept of “water” and to submit plays on that theme. Water, one way or another, is the subject of SSU’s performing arts productions this year, all offered under the title “Water Works.” With these new submissions, however, the trick was that they could be no longer than a single page. Out of all the scripts submitted, 12 have been chosen for a special one-night-only event on March 13. Free to the public, the evening will showcase the selected works in staged readings acted out by students of the SSU acting department.

“I did one-page-play festivals for three years running in San Francisco several years ago,” says Draper. “It’s a fun evening for an audience because it’s a little different, a fast turnover kind of thing. It works really well in the age of Twitter.”

The plays examine the subject of water from different perspectives, exploring H2O from the views of scientists, poets, sociologists and other thirsty people.

“The strict requirement of just having one page forces a certain kind of artistic economy. It’s a fun challenge, and I think some very interesting things have come from it.”

Those dozen new plays are not the only original works being given the water treatment this year. Though students have always been encouraged to write for their senior projects and other student-driven, on-campus projects, this season marks the first time a new student-authored play has been included in the theater department’s official lineup of shows. Dylan Waite’s The Séance, directed by Jon Robin (also a student), takes place in Fresno during a drought, and examines the way a young woman deals with all manner of dry spells, literal, emotional and spiritual.

“When Dylan presented this play, we liked that it dealt with the absence of water in some very clever ways,” says Draper of Waite, who also submitted a pair of plays for the one-page festival. “Clearly, having grown up in Fresno, he knows what he’s writing about.”

Miller Time

Books & Literature

Taylor May

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Mar 6, 2013

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As noted by her husband recently on national TV, Rebecca Miller has lived with many extreme men—a boxer, a deranged butcher, an obsessed oil prospector and, most recently, a U.S. president.

That’s because Miller is married to über-method actor Daniel Day-Lewis, who famously stays in character on and off set throughout the entire length of filming. What kind of woman could endure such eccentricity? One who’s spent her life in the company of unusual, brilliant men—she’s also the daughter of playwright Arthur Miller.

Despite living in enormous shadows, Miller has become an accomplished writer and filmmaker in her own right. She even cast her husband in the starring role of her 2004 film that she wrote and directed, The Ballad of Jack and Rose—which, so great was the talent involved, put the world at great risk of a rift in the space-time continuum.

Averting disaster, Miller wrote the Kafkaesque novel Jacob’s Folly, due out this week, about an 18th-century Jewish peddler reincarnated as a fly in present-day Long Island. She appears on Wednesday, March 13, at Copperfield’s Books. 140 Kentucky St., Petaluma. 6pm. Free. 707.762.0563.

Scientology Slam

Features

Nicolas Grizzle

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Mar 6, 2013

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Remember mp3.com? In the pre-YouTube, early Napster world of the internet, it was how the masses legally downloaded songs and videos. And in the year 2000, before Google was a verb, a video was uploaded to mp3.com of a young red-haired kid named Jamie DeWolf performing a slam poem about his great-grandfather, Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, in front of about 50 people.

Within a week, Scientologists had seen the video and were tracking DeWolf in his hometown.

“They were literally running me down,” says DeWolf. “I had private investigators following me, they showed up at my house. They had this whole cover story that they were promoters putting on a show with me.”

DeWolf’s mother, who had seen Scientology consume and destroy her father and grandfather, eventually clued him in to the intent of these mysterious people. “She recognized them immediately just by their general demeanor and how they were asking questions about me, and tried to identify who they were. She ended up kicking them off the porch.”

SHEEPSKIN SUIT

Everyone’s got their own take on religion, but for DeWolf, the subject is particularly vexing. “It’s really, really difficult growing up as a Christian when your great-grandfather was a cult leader who basically made himself a god, sort of, in our lifetime, for me to do anything without just a complete view of skepticism,” he says on the phone from his home in Oakland.

DeWolf’s conflicted upbringing fuels his writing and performance, which has made the 35-year-old a buzzed-about name in the East Bay hotbed of slam poetry. DeWolf is the featured poet at the monthly North Bay Poetry Slam (NBPS) at Sebastopol’s Hopmonk Tavern on March 10, where fellow Oakland slammer Joyce Lee was featured last month. NBPS host and creator Brianna Sage calls DeWolf “the most well-known performer” the NBPS has hosted, and “possibly the person I look up to the most as a performer.”

DeWolf grew up as a Baptist Christian, and his youthful belief was so fervent that he passed out pamphlets on the impending apocalypse. But now he checks “athiesm” on survey boxes. “I refuse to waste another day speculating on somebody else’s theology that they’re going to pre-package and hand to me,” he says.

As the creator and host of the slam poetry vaudeville show Tourettes Without Regrets, which attracts over 400 attendees each month at the Oakland Metro Operahouse, DeWolf has plenty to keep himself occupied. But lately he’s been taking on even more projects, like the full-length film Smoked, about a botched cannabis-club robbery, which he starred in, wrote, produced and directed. He’s also made several short films based on his poems, and teaches creative writing classes.

Slam poetry isn’t for everyone, but it can be a perfect creative outlet for those seeking release. “A poetry slam is a place for people to share their voices, the things they thought nobody would ever want to hear,” says Sage. Part written word, part performance art, slam poetry is controversial, emotional and often angry. Poems are more in the style of Chuck D than T. S. Eliot. This fits DeWolf like a tailored sheepskin suit, allowing him to walk around unnoticed in everyday life until he reveals his sharp teeth onstage with violent tirades, brutal honesty, intense vulnerability and Ginsu-like sarcasm.

But no matter how much everyday invisibility may be an asset to DeWolf, the giant eye of Scientology is always keeping watch.

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CULT .45

Since being hounded for the mp3.com video—and, that same year, speaking at the first anti-Scientology gathering in the cult’s mecca of Clearwater, Fla.—DeWolf’s been more reactive than proactive in his defiance. “I met a guy who spent millions of dollars battling the church in every court. They fought him with every atom of their being and kind of eventually destroyed this guy,” says DeWolf. “I just saw the sheer totality of how many lives had been utterly wrecked by this insane, tentacled creature that my great-grandfather created, and I realized, ‘Man, there’s a lot more that I want to do with my life right now.'”

Even so, in 2011 he was named the one of the Village Voice‘s “top 25 people crippling Scientology,” and he gave a performance last year on NPR’s Snap Judgment about his family history. (DeWolf changed his last name from Kennedy to his mother’s maiden name after the comedian of the same name started getting popular.)

Such public notice makes his relatives worried. “My family’s always been incredibly leery of anything I’ve said against the cult,” he says, “because they’ve been trying to escape this cult for their entire life.”

But is he worried for himself, too? “Uh, yeah,” he laughs, nervously. “Their legacy of how they have dealt with their opposition is absolutely, staggeringly disgusting.” Bomb threats, phone taps, frame-ups and reputation destruction are just some of the less violent tools the cult has been alleged to have used. “The day that Snap Judgment video came out, I said, ‘You’ve got to let me know when this thing goes public,’ because from that point on I was literally watching for suspicious cars, I was making sure that I was always with someone when I was around, I check my damn brakes when I start my car, stuff like that.”

Amid this, DeWolf has perfected his craft, racking up awards from the National Poetry Slam and Oakland and Berkeley Grand Slam championships. He was a featured performer on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and, in the middle of touring the world with the poetry trio Suicide Kings, made a stop long ago at Sonoma State University.

DIFFERENT KIND OF SLAM

Briana Sage’s North Bay Poetry Slam in Sebastopol sees anywhere from 60 to 150 people for the open mic, featured performer and slam competition format—and the word is spreading. “It’s been growing,” says Sage. “People have just been coming up to me and asking, ‘How can I make this happen?'”

In fact, two monthly slams have started as a result of the NPBS, one at Santa Rosa’s Arlene Francis Center (International House of Poetry, hosting its next slam March 15) and one at Cotati’s Redwood Cafe (the Barnburner Slam, hosting its next slam March 12). Rather than viewing it as competition, Sage, wise beyond her 19 years, embraces the community vibe. “It’s awesome that there are more slams starting around here,” she says. “It’s just about everybody that wants to come share something, and giving them a place to share.”

The Santa Rosa Junior College student started the NBPS in 2010, when she was just 16, after winning the Sonoma County Library Slam in her first public performance. “I started writing when I was seven years old, and from seven to 15 I just performed in front of a mirror and had no idea people ever did these things in front of an audience,” says Sage. “I was so shy. I had bad stage fright—like, ridiculously bad.”

Watching Sage perform and host, one wouldn’t know she even knew the definition of fear.

As a woman, Sage is a minority in the slam poetry world. “It’s a sausage-fest,” explains Joyce Lee, the only woman to earn the title of Oakland’s Grand Slam Champion in the competition’s 15 years. She earned a rousing ovation from the crowd of about 80 at Hopmonk last month with topics ranging from her grandfather’s toughness to her mediocre vagina.

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Though slam poetry may be on an upswing here in the States, it’s still far more popular in Europe. “If you go to Germany and you have an audience of 200 people, that’s a small audience,” says Lee. She’s toured Europe (and has been on NPR’s Snap Judgment five times, making her the program’s most-featured female poet), and says slam poetry in the United States lacks in terms of substance. “Most of the poetry is about nothing, because people fear judgment,” she says. “They fear accountability of changing thought.”

Lee, who has been writing since age eight, has only been slamming for the past six years. “To a lot of people, that’s not a long time,” she says. “A lot of people tell me, ‘You’re still a baby until you’ve been doing it for 10-plus years.'”

If that’s the case, then most of competitors at the North Bay Poetry Slam are still in the womb.

BABIES BOOMING

Unlike Tourettes Without Regrets, which is so popular that it’s forced to pick competitors through random lottery, just about everyone who signs up can get a spot in Sebastopol. The open mic preceding the slam is a good place for first-timers to cut their teeth. “To get on a stage for the first time, to share something as delicate as your heartfelt emotions written into a poem—that’s a lot for someone to be comfortable with,” says Sage. “It doesn’t matter if you forget your words, if you have to read it, if you’re not super-confident about it, the audience will support you. And that’s why I love our show.”

That’s not always the case with slam shows, she adds. Audiences at the weekly Berkeley slam can rip apart a poet who’s unprepared or just doesn’t have the lyrical chops needed to keep it interesting. Lee started working the door at the slam before trying it out herself, and pulls no punches. “When people are up there talking about nothing or saying that we’re all nothing, it’s hard for me to listen to,” she says. “I’m not saying that I get mad, but I truly get bored.” She keeps a book in her purse, she says, and she knows how to use it.

DeWolf understands what it’s like to start small and knows that it doesn’t mean things will stay that way. “It all kind of started in my little small town when I started getting kicked out of my own open mics. Slams are the only show that would not kick me out,” he says.

“I have a lot of love for people who just completely are defiant in the space of small towns and create a space for people to speak and to create an open forum. It’s like flamethrowers for moths. There’s a lot of magic that can happen with that,” says DeWolf. “It certainly changed my life.”

On the Avenue

Dining

Gabe Meline

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Mar 6, 2013

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It’s midday Friday, and Berry Salinas stands between an old used-car lot and a brake shop, inside the former Greyhound station that will soon house her new restaurant. “I think they’re gonna be seriously disappointed if they try to turn this into a bunch of kitschy shops,” she says, looking out onto Santa Rosa Avenue.

In May, Salinas will open Butcher & Cook, a self-described “chicken shack.” Butcher & Cook hits a number of current food trends: a comfort-food menu, a use of locally sourced ingredients and, after 10 weeks sharing space inside of Omelette Express, the transition from a pop-up restaurant to a permanent home.

But Butcher & Cook is also inadvertently a part of a larger trend: food’s ability to transform neighborhoods.

This is the South A neighborhood near Juilliard Park, an area that, according to annual trend stories in local media, has been in a perpetual state of “revitalization” for the last 10 years. Most of that focus has been on the arts, and on the small neighborhood’s galleries, theater companies and artist studios.

Yet while “This Is the Arts District” was the area’s rallying cry five years ago, it’s food that has finally begun to bring more people to the under-utilized neighborhood.

Late last year, the much-buzzed about Spinster Sisters opened to great fanfare. Soon after, Worth Our Weight’s Evelyn Cheatham bought the Cookhouse, a landmark greasy-spoon, and is in the process of reopening it as a restaurant. This year, Criminal Baking Co. opened to a healthy buzz, and across the busy street, Dierk’s Parkside Cafe, one of the city’s most popular breakfast spots, always has crowds of people waiting outside for a table. (Dierk’s has been so successful, in fact, that owner Mark Dierkhising is opening a second location on Fourth Street across from Superburger in the coming months.)

Next to the foodie-approved Taqueria Las Palmas, Salinas will open a place with the kind of word-of-mouth that all but guarantees the restaurant’s success. A resulting infusion of new interest in the neighborhood as a food destination is inevitable; proponents of South A have witnessed that same effect magnified with what’s happened to Valencia Street in San Francisco’s Mission district, and taken note.

A new buzzword has even cropped up for the area: the “Gourmet Ghetto.”

Salinas is a little more realistic. “I don’t really like that term very much,” she says. The 35-year-old Sebastopol farmer also wants to shield Santa Rosa Avenue from inorganic “rebirth.” She’ll serve down-home food: fried chicken, mashed potatoes, coleslaw, collard greens and rotating specials of pork belly and fish ‘n’ chips. Most plates will be around $10.

“There’s a lot of food in Sonoma County,” she says inside the small, 12-by-12-foot dining room, “but there’s not a lot of this kind of shack-eating element that you see in metropolitan areas—like in San Francisco, there are these hole-in-the-wall eating establishments. I always prefer that surprise element, of feeling like you’re discovering something, and I feel like that’s missing here.”

Soon, Judy Kennedy walks by. “I’m so glad you’re moving in here!” she says to Salinas. Kennedy, a longtime neighborhood advocate well-known at city meetings, has for years been trying to ensure the region’s walkability and desirability, and new restaurants, she says, can assist in the “positive experience” that helps push out unwanted nighttime activity.

“There’s one thing that we’re really working on right now, and that’s the prostitution problem,” Kennedy says. “The pimps and their prostitutes stay at the Economy Inn, and the girls, they’re not bringing their clients to the hotels. They’re walking the streets and then going in the neighborhoods, in the car, and doing it. We find condoms in front of our house all the time.”

Down the street, on the curb across from the Spinster Sisters’ lunchtime rush, Jeremiah Flynn and Maria Villano sit in the sun outside Jeremiah’s Photo Corner, one of a handful of retail shops in the neighborhood. Flynn says there’s been no “big boom” in business, but agrees that Spinster Sisters has brought in a whole new crop of visitors. “I have people coming in saying, ‘I had no idea this neighborhood was here.’ I hear that every day,” he says.

“We’ll see how it pans out,” Flynn adds stoically. “It’s like this ‘rebirth,’ again.”

Raissa de la Rosa, who, with Santa Rosa’s Department of Economic Development and Housing, has worked with a number of businesses in the area, agrees. “People get food,” she says. “They don’t always get art.”

A former resident of Oakland’s Temescal district, de la Rosa knows firsthand how restaurants can drive a neighborhood’s renewal, and thinks it can happen with South A Street and Santa Rosa Avenue as well. “There’s more of an impetus for people coming out of the businesses downtown, and, on a beautiful day, walk to those restaurants,” she says. “It’s going to take time, but I think restaurants can do that way more then, say, a gallery would.”

De la Rosa pauses and makes an important point: “I also don’t think the restaurants would be interested in the area,” she says, “if the galleries weren’t there.”

One thing is sure: the neighborhood has a vibe. That suits Salinas perfectly. Before her shared-space run at Omelette Express, she hosted one-off underground dinners and other hush-hush events. Her other business, Meat Revolution, makes sausage, bacon and charcuterie; she delivers to restaurants all over the Bay Area and has a meat CSA.

As for the so-called undesirable element? “I’m not opposed to something being done, but I hope it’s more in that creative vein, where it’s quirky and offbeat,” she says, “and not trying to make it downtown Healdsburg.”

Who’s Responsible?

News

Rachel Dovey

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Mar 6, 2013

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In a lawsuit that could shake up the homecare industry statewide, a Sonoma County caregiver is claiming that she worked seven days a week for three months without ever being paid. While a local judge dismissed the case in 2011, an appellate court’s recent opinion may give it new life, revealing the confusing and sometimes contradictory language of in-home-care laws.

According to court testimony, Santa Rosa caregiver Adelina Guerrero worked as an in-home services provider for Alejandra Buenrostro from November 2008 to January 2009.

Confusion about the manner in which she would be receiving wages left her empty-handed until she went to the county’s In Home Supportive Services (IHSS) department, which pays $11.50 an hour to the caregivers of low-income disabled clients.

“She registered and signed up and attempted to submit [her hours] through the county, and at that point, she found out that the county had already paid for the work,” says Guerrero’s lawyer, Jeff Hoffman of California Rural Legal Assistance.

So where did that money go? Buenrostro’s grandmother and legal representative Sherry Amezcua was registered through IHSS as her care worker, according to Diane Kalijan of Aging and Adult Services. During the time Guerero claims she was working, Amezcua was submitting timesheets and receiving the payment her caregiver is allegedly owed.

Guerrero was never paid, and Buenrostro and her grandmother disappeared, according to Hoffman. The question raised in court is whether these unpaid wages are the responsibility of the county’s IHSS.

County agencies say they aren’t. Although an IHSS social worker vets potential clients and then the public agency foots their caregiving bill, those clients are responsible for hiring, firing and supervising their own caregivers. “The client is considered the employer for their caregiver,” the IHSS website states.

A document from the original legal scuffle, dated May 2011, argues that because the county agency cannot supervise or hire workers, it shouldn’t be considered an employer in this instance either. “A holding that the County or the IHSS-PA is an employer for wage and hour purposes would lead to the absurd result of imposing liability on the County Defendants when they are statutorily prohibited from controlling the employment relationship between the IHSS recipient and the provider,” it reads.

Thus, in the county’s estimation, no foul play on its end occurred. In 2011, the court agreed, and the county’s demurrer was sustained. “We followed the regulations as written and paid the provider of record,” Kalijan says.

But according to Guerrero’s testimony, the county paid the wrong provider—an oversight that, if the caregiver’s story is true, allowed an exchange of public money that looks an awful lot like theft.

“It’s our contention that the county has a duty to investigate this kind of thing,” Hoffman says. Guerrero’s argument juxtaposes these supposedly misdirected payments with federal and state labor laws, claiming that the county was, in fact, her employer.

Her statement isn’t unfounded, according to the court of appeals. In a document called an appellate opinion, published in February, it claims that the county’s role is opaque at best, drawing on past cases and reasoning: “The IHSS statutes treat providers as employees for some purposes, but not for all.”

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When an IHSS worker receives direct payment from a county, for example, their check is coming from the state, which acts as an employer by providing disability benefits, workers’ compensation, federal and state income tax and insurance benefits.

The document cites a 1983 case arguing that IHSS “had complete economic control over the relationship. The ‘economic reality’ was that the [agencies] employed the chore workers to perform social services for the benefit of the recipients. The fact that the [agencies] delegated to the recipients various responsibilities does not alter this, it merely makes them joint employers [with the recipients].”

The Court of Appeals released its statement in February, and further action is pending.

Since Amezcua began collecting wages in 2008, the county has tightened its regulations on caregivers. To collect that hourly wage, workers have to complete an orientation and pass a background check. But when the contested guardian registered as her granddaughter’s caregiver, she didn’t have to do either. She, like absolutely anyone else the disabled person chooses, could simply sign up.

This isn’t unsurprising in a field that is wildly unregulated, at least on the private side. To practice nonmedical home care in California, all you need is a business license. Add to the mix the fact that recipients of this care are often aged, seriously ill or disabled, and you have a recipe for fraud. Last year, the Bohemian reported on a similar case, in which a caregiver disappeared with $22,000 of her elderly client’s money. One of the clients suffered from severe Alzheimer’s, and died soon after her caregiver fled.

And while different laws govern the industry across the public-private spectrum, the murky gray area of who exactly functions as the employer is a common thread. In the world of private home care, referral agencies can collect a hefty portion of a care worker’s hourly wage without providing benefits or workers’ compensation because, technically, the client can be defined as their employer.

“The state of California has some loophole laws,” says Marc Winter, the president of Hired Hands Homecare, a full-service agency that does act as an employer to its caregivers. “Referral agencies can basically farm out caregivers, and everything else is between the caregiver and the senior.”

However, Winter says, the broader implications of this employment triangle aren’t always apparent to all parties involved—especially if the person functioning as an employer has a debilitating disease.

“With the Guerrero case, that’s kind of coming into play,” he says, acknowledging that referral agencies and IHSS are structured in a similar manner.

If the case is successful in its second go-round, it could mean upheaval for the county program.

“It would fundamentally change the IHSS program if the lawsuit was successful,” Kalijan says. “It would change the part about the consumer being the employer; it would change the county’s responsibility; it would change the way providers work with overtime as a consideration. At the minimum, there would have to be state law change, and that would have a tremendous impact on local operations.”

Could this change trickle out into the private industry, sometimes shaped in the same way?

Perhaps, according to Hoffman.

“It’s expounding upon the whole nature of the relationship between employer and employee,” he says. “Any cases that deal with joint employers could possibly be applicable, if, by analogy, they’re doing the same things as the county.”

Whatever the outcome, Hoffman agrees that the case has a far-reaching effect.

“It doesn’t just apply to this county,” he says.

Clunky but True

Movies

Richard von Busack

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Mar 6, 2013

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I agree with everything Greedy Lying Bastards says, yet fans of the H. L. Mencken–style tirade will be unfulfilled.

Director Craig Scott Rosebraugh puts a human face on global warming through interviews with those who lost their homes in the Colorado firestorms, as well as citizens of sinking islands from the Arctic to the South Pacific. As a de facto follow-up to An Inconvenient Truth, it charts the well-paid backlash against greenhouse-gas limits, mostly funded by ExxonMobil and our old chums the Koch brothers, thus the millions to fund alleged think tanks and preposterously named AstroTurf organizations—wretched PR whores, busily exchanging tomorrow’s shame for today’s paycheck.

The graphics, slicker than deer guts on a brass doorknob, show serpentine lines of connection between institutes, mega-corporations and the U.S. government. Cutouts of the offenders spring up with a sound-effects—boing! There is also the token scene that needs exiling from all political documentaries immediately: the director trying to get some villain of a CEO on the phone and making a crying-clown face as the receptionist tells him to go away.

The biggest take-away is the problem of what Rosebraugh calls “assertion”: it takes a far shorter time to state a lie than it does to correct it. Considering that the bill for human recklessness is already coming due, there is something criminal in the smooth-faced ignoramuses (usually the same five or six nonscientists) blaming climate change on volcanoes. You feel the frustration of Congressman Henry Waxman trying to fight not just paid liars, but also his fellow legislators. As it was once said of the Ohio Legislature, the oil companies have done everything to Congress but refine it.

There were 31.6 billion tons of CO2 released in 2011, and meanwhile “experts” add to the grim total, jetting from studio to studio to lie the truth out of school. The film does good work reminding us of who these people are, anyway.

‘Greedy Lying Bastards’ opens Friday, March 8, at the Century Regency 6, 280 Smith Ranch Road, San Rafael. 415.479.6496.

Out of the Shadows

Music

Gabe Meline

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Mar 6, 2013

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When Jeff Mangum steps out on to the stage of the Phoenix Theater on April 9, it won’t just be another show for the history books. It’ll also be a minor miracle.

That’s because for years, Mangum, frontman and genius behind the universally revered band Neutral Milk Hotel, seemed to disappear almost entirely. He stopped making music. His label, Merge Records, dutifully denied requests for interviews. Rumors swirled of his alleged mental problems, his presumed agoraphobia, even his possible death.

Over this 10-year span, Neutral Milk Hotel’s 1997 masterpiece In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, at first a cult record, enjoyed exponentially increasing sales and turned into a signpost for a new generation. With the instrumentation of Love’s Forever Changes and the lyrical density of Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, and using the story of Anne Frank as a rough thematic guide, the album routinely shows up on top-selling vinyl lists, on “most influential albums of all time” lists, on “Best Albums of the 1990s” lists.

What did Mangum do to promote it upon its release? After a modest tour, Mangum, feeling the mounting pressure of fame, faded away. For a long time, all anyone knew was that he’d gone overseas and captured field recordings of native folk music in Bulgaria. It only added to the mystique.

Mangum’s is the type of story that Searching for Sugarman–style filmmakers salivate over, that rock journalists love, that fans frustratingly try to comprehend. Then, in 2008, it was almost as if the pressure of being a mythic reclusive became greater than the pressures of fame. Mangum started performing as a guest musician for other bands. Finally, at a show in Kentucky, he led the audience outside the venue, down the street to a nearby field and, with some former Neutral Milk Hotel members, played In the Aeroplane‘s “The Fool,” outside in the nighttime air. It was the first Neutral Milk Hotel performance in 10 years.

Over the next few years, Mangum popped up more often—at other bands’ shows, at benefits for sick friends and, most famously, at the Occupy Wall Street protests in Zuccotti Park. Slowly, he began touring, but remained wary of the attention. At a show in Oakland last year, he walked onto the stage and silently motioned for people to put down their cameras and phones; amazingly, they complied.

Three things can be expected of Mangum’s show in Petaluma. One, tickets will go quickly. Two, people will sing along, loudly. But mostly, Mangum will dazzle the faithful who spent 10 years believing.

Damn You, Digital

Movies

Gabe Meline

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Mar 6, 2013

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You may have never seen a movie at the Rio Theater, but chances are you’ve driven by it: it’s the WWII-era Quonset hut just past the “Vacation Wonderland” sign in the town of Monte Rio.

Inside, the quaint one-screen is refreshingly removed from the moviegoing experience at large megaplexes. With its hand-picked music, personalized slides, and fabric from Christo’s fence hanging from the ceiling, it’s become a beloved staple of the West County community. And it needs the community’s help.

As we’ve covered in these pages before, the big studios will soon stop shipping movies to theaters on 35mm film, forcing movie theaters to convert to digital projection or else screen Phat Beach on infinite repeat. To stay alive, the Rio Theater needs to go digital. This is no major problem for chains like Cinemark and Regency, but financially, it’s a hell of an obstacle for small exhibitors like the Rio.

Along with a Kickstarter campaign, this weekend, the Rio hosts a “Save the Rio” mixer and movie with libations and nosh before a screening of the camp classic The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Proceeds go to purchasing a damned digital projector, sadly required nowadays, when the music of drag shows fills the room on Sunday, March 10, at the Rio Theater. 20396 Bohemian Hwy., Monte Rio. 1pm. $25. 707.865.0913.