A new milestone in local community journalism has been achieved over at Healdsburg Patch with the incredible blog post “I’m Stoned When I Can’t Connect My Bluetooth Keyboard,” written by one Cathy Gumina Odom.
Odom is using medical marijuana for pain of various sources, and
The lineup for the totally crazy Bottle Rock Napa Valley music festival running May 8-12 has been announced, and boy, is it nuts. Can we just say it right now: Best North Bay Festival Lineup Ever?
Acts include:
The Black Keys
Alabama Shakes
The Flaming Lips
Ben Harper & Charlie Musselwhite
The Shins
Bad Religion
Iron and Wine
Edward Sharpe
Mavis Staples
Rodrigo y Gabriela
Cake
Michael Franti & Spearhead
The Wallflowers
Blues Traveler
Brandi Carlile
Donovan Frankenreiter
Group Love
By my count, that’s about seven bands that are huge headliners in their own right, plus a lot of festival heavy-hitters. Not to mention: there are over 40 bands scheduled to descend on the Napa Valley for the festival, with a complete lineup and full info promised for this Friday.
The festival runs May 8-12 primarily at the Napa Valley Expo, which will have four stages. Other shows are at various venues around town, including the Uptown Theatre. Food, wine, craft beer, comedy, and afterparties throughout downtown are all part of the deal.
I’ll say it again: This is nuts.
VIP and group tickets go on sale here on Feb. 3; public tickets go on sale on Feb. 10. We’ll update here as more info. comes in.
UPDATE, Jan. 30: According to the festival’s Facebook page, three-day passes are $299, four-day passes are $399 and VIP Reserve passes for $599. Locals get a discounted rate with three-day passes at $229, four-day passes at $329, and VIP for $529.)
UPDATE II, Jan. 31: The Black Crowes have this festival listed on their official website tour dates. Also, little birdies are chirping that Macklemore is playing a kickoff show for the festival , and judging by the festival’s first-ever tweet, that’s probably very likely. There’s also a “leaked” lineup going around that is almost certifiably fake.
UPDATE III, Feb. 1: Lots of news this morning.
Added to the festival: Jane’s Addiction, Kings of Leon, Furthur featuring Bob Weir and Phil Lesh, Primus, Zac Brown Band, Dwight Yoakam, and Cafe Tacuba.
Ticket prices are as listed above. As of yet, there are no single-day tickets announced. Napa Valley locals, artist fan club members, community partners and “Friends of the 49ers” will be able to buy 3- and 4-day passes starting Feb. 3. Passes go on sale to the general public on Feb. 10.
The Macklemore show is Wednesday, May 8, and is free for all three- and four-day passholders. Individual tickets will be sold to this show as well at $29, available Feb. 10.
Headliners by Day:
Wednesday, May 8: Macklemore and Ryan Lewis
Thursday, May 9: Furthur, the Black Crowes, Primus
Friday, May 10: Black Keys, Alabama Shakes, the Shins
Saturday, May 11: Jane’s Addiction, Bad Religion, Ben Harper, Edward Sharpe
Sunday, May 12: Zac Brown Band, Rodrigo y Gabriela, Cake
The incredible thing is that this festival is not being put on by Live Nation, Goldenvoice, or even Another Planet. It’s being put on by two Napa locals, Gabe Meyers and Bob Vogt, who had a hand in the resurrection and reopening of the Uptown Theatre.
I’ll say it yet again: This is nuts.
Cloverdale? Isn’t that the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it town on the way to River Rock Casino? Maybe, but it’s also home to a fine performing arts center hosting the Brothers Comatose. This folk string quintet has no ego when it comes to where it plays. Whether it’s festivals like Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, Strawberry, High Sierra, Outside Lands, Kate Wolf, SXSW or hometown hootenannies at tiny clubs for dedicated fans, it’s refreshing for a group’s personality to match its sound so well. They wrote a song called “Pie for Breakfast,” and that says a lot, right there. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to find a pie… The Brothers Comatose play Saturday, Feb. 2, at the Cloverdale Performing Arts Center. 209 N. Cloverdale Blvd., Cloverdale. 7pm. $20-$25. 707.894.2214.
When one is a practicing sex educator and clinical sexologist with several degrees to her credit, it’s only a matter of time before a book deal or movie option comes around. Now a major motion picture nominated for an Oscar, The Sessions is a story of one of Cheryl Greene’s patients who was confined to an iron lung after contracting polio at age six. The devoutly religious man wanted to know what it’s like to “be” with a woman, in the Biblical sense; Greene served as his sex surrogate and, lo and behold, it changed his life and inspired a Hollywood script. Greene speaks about her new book, An Intimate Life: Sex, Love and My Journey as a Sex Surrogate Partner, on Friday, Feb. 1, at Book Passage. 51 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera. 7pm. Free. 415.927.0960.
If you can’t get up to Tahoe, you can always live vicariously through the Tahoe Adventure Film Festival. Now with POV footage from GoPro-style cameras, skiing and snowboarding videos are more amazing to watch than ever. But it’s not just winter sports highlighted here. Kayaking, rock climbing, surfing, skating and mountain biking films are included, as well as BASE jumping—you know, when people put on a wingsuit and fly at high speeds like a squirrel through the air. Or, if you don’t know, be sure to see the Tahoe Adventure Film Festival on Friday, Feb. 1, at the Mystic Theatre. 23 Petaluma Blvd. N., Petaluma. 7:30pm. $15. 707.765.2121.
Mix some Bob Dylan, a little Marvin Gaye and a touch of Paul Simon, ship it to South Africa and back, and you’ll have a sense of Vusi Mahlasela’s music. The title track from his debut album When You Come Back became an anthem 20 years ago in the fight to end apartheid. “Sing loud sing to the people,” he sings. “Let them give something to the world and not just take from it.” He’s huge in his home country, and is such a tremendous guitarist and songwriter that it’s baffling why he isn’t more popular in the United States. Vusi Mahlasela plays Thursday, Jan. 31 at Napa Valley Opera House. 1030 Main St., Napa. 8pm. $15-$20. 707.226.7372.
Move over, Rome. For beer aficionados from across the globe, all roads lead to Santa Rosa, where the Russian River Brewing Company unveils its limited edition Pliny the Younger every February. “It’s Pliny the Elder on steroids,” co-owner Natalie Cilurzo says of the famous brew, which contains three times the hops of their regular IPA. Beginning at 11am on Friday, Feb. 1, the brewery will dole out the rationed beer one 10-ounce glass at a time every day until Valentine’s Day.
Repeatedly voted the No. 1 beer in the world, it’s no wonder Pliny the Younger draws people from as far away as Japan and Europe waiting up to five hours for their turn. Because the line sometimes snakes all the way down to D Street, “I’ve been offered $100 to sneak people in the back door before,” says longtime RRBC employee Gabe Rivera. (Schucksters, take note: he refuses all bribes.)
Despite its cult-like following, Pliny the Younger is not the cash cow one might assume. In fact, the beer is available only once a year precisely because it takes so much time, effort, space and money to brew. For the region at large, however, the economic benefits are substantial, which is why Pliny the Younger figures prominently in a current study by the Sonoma County Economic Development Board regarding the impact of local craft breweries. This year, the Flamingo Hotel is even offering a special “Pliny the Younger” rate for out-of-towners. How’d’ya like those suds?
In a profitable twist of fate, a private construction company is selling $98,000 worth of redwood trees to a public agency, largely from public land.
Last December, Ghilotti Construction was awarded a $30.5 million contract to replace the Airport Boulevard overpass along Highway 101, according to Caltrans’ website. The overpass will include new, longer on- and offramps, one of which will extend over Mark West Creek, and will result in the permanent closure of ramps just south at Fulton Road.
The project requires the removal of roughly 600 trees, underway now. With Ghilotti subcontractor Atlas Tree Service on site, stumps and bare logs now take the place of the redwoods, visible to motorists on the road.
Like so many of the redwoods along the northern corridor, these were non-native trees planted for aesthetic reasons decades ago in the early stages of the freeway’s construction. According to the project’s EIR, the redwoods “reinforce motorists’ perception of the regional landscape character and Highway 101 as the ‘Redwood Highway.'”
Many of the trees towered on land in Caltrans’ existing right-of-way, according to documents on Sonoma County Transportation Authority’s website. Highly detailed maps from a 2001 project study report show state right-of-way as a dotted line extending several feet beyond Highway 101’s border on either side, and stretching around the circular on- and offramps of both the Fulton and Airport overpasses. The majority of redwoods being felled are in grassy islands inside these snaking ramps.
Strangely, Ghilotti assumes possession of the valuable trees once cut down. In fact, the Sonoma County Water Agency is buying 200 logs from Ghilotti at the aforementioned cost of $98,000, according to SCWA spokesperson Brad Sherwood. The logs will provide structural enhancements along Dry Creek, which will be widened and shaped to benefit endangered coho and steelhead as part of ongoing improvements.
That’s a selling price of $490 a log—a cost that Sherwood says is fair value lumber price.
“Thirty-foot logs go for anywhere from $400 to $500,” he says. “The logs we’re purchasing are anywhere from 20 to 30 feet.”
Still, how can the property of a public entity be ceded to a private corporation and then sold to another public agency for a profit, with taxpayer money on both ends?
Kevin Howze, an engineer with the county’s department of planning and public works, has worked alongside staff from the Sonoma County Transportation Authority and Caltrans on the Airport Boulevard project. He says he isn’t aware of the details of this particular lumber transfer, but adds that it isn’t unprecedented.
“It’s not uncommon that debris can be the contractor’s responsibility,” he says. “Sometimes it has value; other times it’s nothing more than a nuisance.”
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When asked if the deal could be complicated by the fact that many of the trees are on public state land and being sold—by a private company—to a public county agency, Howze responded that though unusual, “there’s nothing inherently wrong with it.”
“It was explained to me that Ghilotti is contracted with Caltrans to clear the site,” Sherwood says, adding that he, too, asked how the trees became the contractor’s property when he heard about the deal, and that county contractors and legal counsel were contacted to ensure this was standard practice. “As part of that responsibility,” he says, “they essentially own whatever’s on the site.”
Ghilotti did not return a call seeking comment.
As redwoods from the state right-of-way are being sold to the SCWA, a plot of land between the two onramps that was designated as county open space is also going away to Caltrans for construction. A document from the Transportation and Public Works board meeting dated March 20, 2012, details the transfer, which includes two parcels of land in a 610-foot strip near Mark West Creek.
“The Specific Plan for the Sonoma County Airport Industrial Area, dated July 13, 1987, designates a portion of the subject property as a riparian conservation and enhancement corridor,” the document reads. “The State’s proposed use of the subject property as a freeway project is clearly incompatible with the Specific Plan designation.”
However, the document concludes, Caltrans would likely seize the property via eminent domain for the freeway widening project if the county agency attempted to hold on to it. The open space land was ultimately offered to the state via a possession and use agreement, which stipulates that Caltrans “make its best efforts to convey easements to the County over the subject property and other adjoining land in the vicinity for future public access purposes.”
One of these uses will ideally be a pathway near the creek that runs under the freeway. In the county’s 2010 general plan, a multi-use pathway is called for the site, running between Old Redwood Highway and the SMART railroad tracks, similar to the Prince Memorial Greenway along Santa Rosa Creek. As it stands now, the county will have to hope Caltrans operates in good faith to allow the county usage of the former open space land.
“If we went to court, we would just get money, so hopefully we’ll still have something we can negotiate with,” says Eric Nelson, an agent with the Transportation and Public Works Department. He points out that this piece of land isn’t unique; it’s one of many being used by Caltrans for the widening project, part of the Highway 101 congestion relief program begun in 2004 (or, as local bumper stickers once famously declared, “Three Lanes All the Way”).
Though concern has arisen over the highly visible redwood removal along the freeway in Petaluma, Nelson says he hasn’t heard any protest about the Airport- and Fulton-area trees from local conservation groups.
“As to the ugliness of taking down the redwoods, we haven’t really had an oar in that water,” says Steve Birdlebough, chair of the local Sierra Club chapter. “Maybe we should have. That’s when the chickens come home to roost for a lot of folks. It’s the final realization of ‘Oh dear me, what have we done?'”
Most of the Sierra Club’s efforts were in the EIR stage of the 101 expansion, Birdlebough says, ensuring that HOV lanes to encourage carpooling were part of the mix.
“In the ’70s and ’80s, the Sierra Club’s concern was much about visual scenery,” he says. “In the ’90s and ’00s, our concern has turned toward the question of climate disruption and use of fossil fuels, of changes so serious we humans may not be able to adapt fast enough.”
Perhaps not. But in the meantime, freeways expand, trees turn a nice profit, and the “Redwood Highway” is becoming ever more a misnomer.
In his woodstove-heated Sebastopol studio, overlooking his grandparents’ old backyard where he used to hunt Easter eggs as a child, Ricky Watts remembers the first time he got arrested.
“I was 15,” he says, “and it was a citizen’s arrest. A guy was walking his dog and saw us painting under a bridge, and he called the police. And the police were so quick to move on us that we had nowhere to go.”
Watts had some explaining to do to his parents, and went to court, but fortunately, it would also be his last arrest. “I was always very lucky,” Watts says carefully, “for the amount of illegal graffiti that I did over the span of 10 to 12 years.”
The image of a wide-eyed kid who just wanted to paint being thrown in a police car could serve as a blueprint for the dichotomy between innocence and maturity that fuels Watts’ new pieces in “Destination Unknown,” a collection of new paintings at Boomerang Gallery inside Heebe Jeebe in Petaluma, opening Feb. 2. In the pieces, children play obliviously in front of a train wreck; hot-air balloons soar over coastal ghettos; smoke and rubble from the 1906 earthquake give way to a colorful street scene, and more.
Now 32, Watts no longer goes out on all-night sojourns with a backpack full of supplies like he used to—though one wall of his studio is still entirely covered with spray paint cans—and instead has graduated to creating detailed works over the course of several months rather than minutes. He’s regularly commissioned to paint murals, signs, storefronts and even cars, but it’s his intricate paintings, blending the realistic and the phantasmagorical, that consume most of his passion.
That passion has paid off. Taking a cue from his Symphony of Perception, a large re-imagining of Brazilian favelas that sold for $8,000 last year, Watts’ new works in “Destination Unknown” combine floating orbs and strange animals with an incredibly disciplined attention to architecture. A painted illustration of the Fox Theater in Oakland is particularly intricate, with impossibly minuscule lines making up the stained glass, the stonework and the lettering on the marquee.
“Usually, about halfway through every drawing,” Watts laughs, “I think to myself, ‘What the hell am I doing?’ Because it gets so detailed, I get so overwhelmed.”
Watts, the grandson of a sign painter and woodworker, was raised in Petaluma, where he drew comics for himself in elementary school. When he was 13, he discovered graffiti. “I [found] a graffiti magazine, and that’s when I saw the real artistic, colorful murals that people were doing,” he says. “That’s what blew my mind. I thought, ‘I’m not really good at this vandalism part.’ You know? I would feel guilty about doing it. But I thought how cool it would be to create these big, colorful murals with spray paint.”
Soon, Watts teamed up with his friend Jared Powell, with whom he still works and collaborates, and the two became late-night spray-paint partners. “And we had no idea what we were doing,” he explains of those teen years. “It was all very trial-and-error. It’s very different now. There are these websites that will literally teach you how to build up a complex piece of graffiti; it shows you the step-by-step process. And we were doing it completely backwards.”
A breakthrough came when Watts was 16 and Tom Gaffey let him paint a mural inside the Phoenix Theater, legally and on his own time. “It really helped build that foundation of learning different techniques,” Watts says. Those techniques eventually led Watts to a long-running abstract stage in his art—lots of swirling patterns that laterally resemble oceanic eels or muscle tissue.
But a recent series of 10 line illustrations based on the 19th-century architecture of Petaluma—which, unlike Santa Rosa, was unaffected by the 1969 earthquakes—opened him back up to the fine-tip pen. “I’m very drawn to the history of Petaluma, and that could be something I get from my mom, who’s kind of a Petaluma historian,” Watts notes. The series included the McNear building, the Masonic building and its iconic clock tower, and a street scene looking east on Washington Street, including Volpi’s, the Petaluma Hotel and the California Theater. In one, a large chicken stomps along Petaluma Boulevard, destroying the town that over time has lost its title as the chicken capital of America.
It’s uncommon for graffiti artists to morph into renowned names in the fine art world, though there is a growing number of examples. Barry McGee, the San Francisco legend once known as Twist, has substantial pieces in the SFMOMA’s permanent collection and last year put together a massive retrospective for the Berkeley Museum of Art. His current style—most widely known by small faces painted on glass bottles—is starkly different from his late-1980s tags and murals.
Stephen Powers, a Philadelphia graffiti artist known as ESPO, began expanding the typography of tagging, left graffiti in 2000 and is now commissioned to paint large murals worldwide. His series A Love Letter for You covers aged buildings throughout Philadelphia with phrases like “Miss You Too Often Not To Love You” and “Your Everafter Is All I’m After” painted in vintage billboard style.
Watts’ most high-profile job came last year at the Outside Lands music festival in Golden Gate Park, which chose his Bone Shaker to use on the gigantic scrim banner of one of the stages. It wasn’t a lark; a dry-erase board in the studio shows a full slate of upcoming work, and between art and graphic design, Watts is paying the bills.
Watts plans to move back to Petaluma this year, and in another sort of coming home, has been asked by the Petaluma Arts Center to paint the south wall of the Phoenix Theater—a massive, 50-by-40-foot urban canvas.
“It’s always been a dream of mine to paint that wall,” he says, cracking a sly smile of his former graffiti-artist self. “It’ll easily be the largest wall I’ve ever painted.”
When he was just five years old, Octavio Diaz was burned by a kettle of hot milk while watching his mother make hot chocolate over their open-flamed adobe oven. Despite the pain to his chest and arms, Diaz stuck by his mother’s side, absorbing her techniques, her recipes—and mostly, her passion.
“We are the first generation of men in my family who love to cook,” he says of himself and his brothers.
For the past decade, the Diaz family has steadily climbed the culinary ladder in Healdsburg, where they now own two restaurants and a market. Diaz’s brother Pedro runs El Farolito on Plaza Street, having started as a dishwasher eight years ago; his youngest brother, Francisco, runs a second location in Windsor. On Cinco de Mayo 2010, Diaz opened Agave Restaurant & Tequila Bar in Healdsburg’s Safeway shopping center, a location that belies the restaurant’s gastronomic sophistication.
And just this past August, with a music- and masquerade-filled celebration, Diaz opened Casa del Molé Mercado y Carniceria on Center Street (formerly Los Mares), named for his mother Juana’s increasingly famous mole negro, which she makes from scratch weekly. Every few months, Diaz’s parents return to the Zocalo market in their native Oaxaca to procure several of the 32 total ingredients—which include plantains, walnuts, animal crackers, chocolate, and a variety of chiles—that give mole its distinct flavor.
Passed down through four generations of Oaxacan women, Juana’s unique recipe contains no lard or sugar, though she does use local Gravenstein apples and golden raisins for sweetness. The entire process takes about three days, from the first roasting of the chiles to the final jarring of the sauce, which is available for purchase at Casa del Molé ($12.99 for a 16-ounce jar). “One of our secrets,” Diaz confides, “is to remove all the seeds from the peppers, because they are bitter. It takes a lot of work, but it’s worth it.”
Hard work comes naturally to Diaz, for whom success is the only option. “I cannot fail,” he tells me matter-of-factly. As the oldest of seven siblings, he feels the pressure of being a leader for his family, many of whom have gained citizenship over the past decade, and whose generosity made his restaurant dream a reality. “In this economy, our family is our bank,” says Diaz, “which allows us to stay out of debt and not pay interest.”
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When he was 13 years old, Diaz left Oaxaca to live with his aunt and uncle in Rohnert Park. During high school, he worked as a busboy at the Red Lion Hotel (now the Doubletree), where he met a hostess and college student named Nancy. “I used to ride my bike to SSU from Rancho Cotate to see her,” Diaz says of the woman who’s been his wife since 1997. Red Lion proved auspicious in another way as well. “That’s where I discovered my love for hospitality,” he says.
Though Diaz toyed with the idea of being a teacher, one semester of teaching a beverage-management class in the SRJC culinary program convinced him otherwise. “It was very hard,” he admits, “and I realized I wanted to stick with restaurants instead. I have the highest respect for teachers,” says Diaz, who credits the SRJC with helping him achieve his goals.
When it comes to food, Diaz is committed to bringing more vegetables into Mexican cuisine. Casa del Molé’s produce section is even bigger and more colorful than the pastry case, and Diaz gets as excited about cabbage as he does about their homemade chorizo and goat stew. “It’s like having our own farmers market,” he says of Casa del Molé, which supplies all three of the Diaz restaurants, “but it’s open every day.”
Even though Agave offers standard taqueria items like burritos and nachos, it’s the traditional Oaxacan food that Diaz is most proud of: molotes, deep fried masa stuffed with potato, chorizo and herbs ($10); pollo asado, grilled chicken that’s been marinated in a secret sauce de la casa ($11); tlayuda, a corn tostada topped with beans, cabbage, avocado, salsa and queso fresco ($10); and of course, the molé de Oaxaca, served atop chicken ($13) or enchiladas ($12). True to its name, Agave also offers a huge selection of tequilas and mescals, many from family-run distilleries in remote Oaxacan villages.
Like Agave’s menu, Diaz’s world straddles the old and the new. Though he comes from a family of seven siblings, he is stopping at two when it comes to his own kids, in part, he says, “because I want to give them the best life possible.”
He is an intrinsic part of the Healdsburg community, greeting nearly every other person he sees as we walk from Agave to Casa del Molé on a recent Thursday afternoon. But his ties to Oaxaca, where his grandmother still lives, remain strong.
“Part of my motivation to work hard is to make my grandma proud,” he says, “because we are like the harvest of her hard work.”
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