• Miriam Hodgman
• Art is Medicine Show, 2012

Santa Rosa’s Imaginists theater company announced today it’s touring summer show will be fully funded thanks to a $10,000 grant from the National Endowment of the Arts.

Imaginists Artistic Director Amy Pinto is excited about the possibilities this funding opens up. “Because of it, we can take more performances to the Redwood Empire Food Bank Summer Lunch sites,” she says. “And tour Federico Garcia Lorca’s ‘The Billy-Club Puppets’ to local parks on the weekends. This is the beginning of a new era for the Medicine Show.”

The grant supports the Art is Medicine Show (El Show el Arte es Medicina), a series of free, bilingual performances in Santa Rosa. The shows will tour by bicycle caravan through July and August. Along with a core group of professional actors, the Imaginists offers internships to high school seniors and college level students.

This weekend, Mother Jones posted an article entitled “Yes, Liberals Rule the Ivory Tower—But Why?”

It examines a new book by sociologist Neil Gross, “Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care?” which debunks that old myth that professors are brainwashed, radicalized lefties who want to do the same to impressionable freshman. Advanced academia, it points out, is hardly a mill in which corn-fed, constitution-lovers go in and tattooed Marxists come out. Instead, all the Marxists want to go and be with other Marxists, creating a kind of self-selection that might uphold the maxim that the Ivory Tower leans left, but shows that it’s not quite why you would think.
You can read it here.

There’s a couple things about the Huey Lewis car theft story that caught my interest. The gist of it is a 31-year-old woman stole his rental car, which contained his laptop, from a Holiday Inn Express in Mill Valley. She was caught and sentenced this week, but the laptop is still missing.

1) The laptop has not been recovered. Was he working on new tracks for Huey Lewis & the News? Will the unfinished masters be leaked to the Internet?

2) Lewis, a longtime Marin County icon, now lives in Montana. Further investigation shows he also does not like people hunting ducks on his property, and that the way to deal with this is to set out duck bait, signaling to hunters (and legally declaring) that duck hunting is not allowed on the property.

3) He was staying at a Holiday Inn Express. I’m sure that is a nice place and all, but really? That’s one step up from a Best Western. Let’s get Huey Lewis a real hotel to stay in. A nice B&B or something.

4) The woman only received a 50-day sentence and it can be reduced to a misdemeanor in a year. Stealing a candy bar and stealing a car with a laptop inside are the same crime now? Really?

5) This is only news because the victim is the front man of a band called the News, and journalists love to use that word in print.

The Press Democrat reports that a Petaluma-based mortgage company is currently under investigation by the Department of Justice. According to the article, several people who were in the midst of foreclosures claim they were swindled by owner Miguel Lopez, who allegedly charged an up-front fee to restructure their mortgages. They claim that he took $2000 and then never actually did anything to help them.

You can read the story here. It reports that the offices of Lopez are apparently unmarked. His Website is down as well.
We have covered the foreclosure crisis before, showing the desperate measures people will take when faced with losing their homes. In Leilani Clark’s story House and Home, about the Homeowner Bill of Rights, a Forestville resident tells her: “There have been times that suicide was an option for me.”
You can read her story here.

Adding to an increasingly long list of stories in the Press Democrat about the new owners of the paper, a story by Derek Moore today looks into the “controversy in Sonoma” about the revised building plans for Chateau Sonoma Hotel and Spa.

Darius Anderson, founder and CEO of Kenwood Investments, backing the project, is also, as many know, one of the principals of Sonoma Media Investments, owner of the Press Democrat.

Of course Anderson and his partner Doug Bosco, another principal at Sonoma Media Investments, have been in the news regularly lately—story about lobbying, story about Jared Huffman, story about Gov. Brown. The two are newsmakers in this area, but the recent influx of stories “above the fold” about their dealings is a little hard to stomach.

Take the very well-written story by Kevin McCallum about the Sacramento Kings which graced the front page of the Press Democrat late last month. Fine, Anderson is a big wheeler-and-dealer in this situation, which is justifiable sports news . . . in Sacramento. This seemed like a story for the Sacramento Bee, or something the PD could have pulled from the Associated Press—not one to have a stellar reporter like McCallum spend valuable time covering when he could have been writing about more relevant things to our community.

As for the Anderson’s hotel, I’m not suggesting the residents of Sonoma don’t find this issue important. It is. In the story, Moore writes: “The Index-Tribune building, an adjacent warehouse and an antique store, all owned by Anderson, will be razed to make way for the hotel complex.”

This is news, and I am glad it is being covered. The voices against the development were heard, and reported on in the Press Democrat, and that is important. But the more stories about the new owners that aren’t relevant to the local community, the less inclined readers will be to take seriously the ones that are.