The mood was hot and apocalyptic in line at the Smith Rafael Film Center on a recent Tuesday as patrons waited for the doors to open to Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, Martin Scorsese’s Netflix documentary about the mid-’70s Dylan tour of the same name. Or, should we say, part-mockumentary?

The much-anticipated film debuted last week and the movie played at select theaters around the country for one-night stands. It’s an enjoyable romp through a shaggy, barrelhouse Dylan of the macrame mid-’70s. True to the Dylan mythos, the film is larded with entertaining reams of pure malarkey. We’ll get to that in a minute.

That night, tickets sold out and the line extended down the block as a trio of moviegoers lamented the scorching heat next to where I stood, waiting. To get with the spirit of the thing, it’s worth noting that you didn’t need a weatherman to know which way the hot winds were blowing. I tuned an ear as one of the moviegoers waved his arms into the hot air and declared, “And this will be considered a cool day 30 years from now.”

He was late middle-aged, and his comrades nodded in sad agreement at the moviegoer’s climate change–driven prognostication. The conversation continued into greater depths of end-times despair, peppered with resilience, if not defiance, in the face of what’s now being promoted as imminent global catastrophe. That was the bad news. The good news was that the theater offered the promise of air conditioning, popcorn and the Desire-era music of Bob Dylan on the big screen.

As the trio continued with their end-times lament I couldn’t help but think, Generation X outcast that I am, “You Baby Boomers should have done more about global climate change when you had the chance.” I immediately felt horribly guilty for the thought, and chalked it up to the heat, which was making everyone cranky.

At last the doors opened and everyone took their seats. The film was introduced by a Film Center staffer who noted, almost apologetically, that the movie everyone paid $13 to see would be on Netflix the next day—but we’d get the benefit of the big screen and Dolby sound, he said quickly. Did anyone feel scammed? Not by that.

The emcee asked the crowd whether anyone had been on the Rolling Thunder tour and hands shot up from every corner of the theater. Well, who wasn’t? I would have raised my hand, too, except I was in the third grade when Dylan launched his ramshackle tour in October, 1975 and was more interested in dressing up like Fonzie than fuzzy folkies bearing whiteface.

The movie is an account of the first, East Coast leg of Dylan’s U.S. tour that year and 1976 and was pegged around the release his album Desire—and after the Band had danced its last waltz for legions of fans in large stadiums the year before.

Rolling Thunder was a famously unprofitable tour, with Dylan himself driving the bus to small venues in small towns around the country, playing to nothing but the cheap seats. The tour was conceived, as Rolling Stone reported in 1975, as a sort of thank-you dished by Dylan to some of the folkies and poets who’d come up with him out of the New York folk music scene. The ground zero for that scene was a neighborhood bar in Greenwich Village called the Kettle of Fish that’s still around. The tour would continue through spring of 1976 and yielded a live album that was panned at the time by snoot-crits Robert Christgau and Janet Maslin. Like the sixties itself, they inevitably wrote, the saggy back-end of Dylan’s tour bore no resemblance to its high energy kick-off a year before. Whatevs. It’s high praise, if you ask me, to be panned by Robert Christgau.

And, it’s high praise indeed that Scorsese continued with Dylan’s penchant for larding his music and books with cheeky or cryptical gestures and tricks. If you’ve been keeping up, there’s a growing “scandal” over the amount of B.S. that’s layered into Rolling Thunder, which reminds me of a joke about academia that goes along the lines of: “Why are debates in academia so fraught and riven with anger and passion?” Punch line: “Because the stakes are so low.”

I knew there was something weird about this movie from the opening credits on, and it wasn’t just the sight of Mick Ronson onstage in his Ziggy Stardust attire, looking like the future had come to tweak the past as it gave way to disco. That was pretty funny, seeing Ronson windmilling on stage with a bunch of shaggy hippies. Ronson wasn’t some CGI phantom shoved into film—he really did tour with Dylan. As did Marin’s own Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, the recipient of some clever shade offered from Dylan regarding the formerly seafaring Elliott’s singing voice. “He should stick to making knots,” was the gist of Dylan’s crack about Elliott, who sings about knots in a few of his songs. What are you really saying, Bob? Well, the Marin crowd cheered at the mention of our local folk legend.

As I was driving back to West Marin after the screening, it was late and I started to reflect on Scorsese’s entertaining romp—and chuckled at how it was that several images, which had nothing to do with Dylan, were sort of seared into my mind.

One was of a photo of Gene Simmons that appears in the film. Why? Well, Dylan’s violinist, Scarlet Rivera, was then reportedly dating the co-founder of Kiss. That may or may not be true. What is true is that Simmons looks downright creepy. I also couldn’t stop reflecting on how Allen Ginsberg kept scratching at his sock whenever a beachside clip of him dispensing poetic ruminations came on-screen. Ginsberg was signed on to the tour at its outset but his planned poetic interludes were scrapped, due to risk of the shows going on forever.

And now for a flashback. I’m back in line outside the theater, and the man is despairing about climate change. He expresses despair over the dried-up lava tubes of Mt. Shasta that once coursed with mountain water, and everyone shakes their heads at the answer to the question, “Well, what are they going to do about the renaming of Glacier Park.” Write a song about it?

A woman chimes in with defiance that amid fears of global catastrophe, apocalyptic doom and a generalized sense that everything’s gone to hell with Trump in the White House, that she’d spent her life working in nonprofits, trying to do the right thing in the face of why bother. It’s all making sense now. Joan Baez features heavily in the film and I’ve always loved her maxim that “action is the antidote to despair.”

Later, I thought about how Baez and Dylan had come up in a world that had walked to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis, only to be saved from armageddon by a president, John F. Kennedy, who would himself be assassinated.

When Dylan sings of that “hard rain that’s gonna fall,” he wasn’t talking about Superstorm Sandy, but he might as well have been. I listened as the trio wondered what was in store for this planet in 12 years, as climate change–scientists have denoted that time frame as when humanity will start to reckon with global warming on a globally scary scale. The mood in line reminded me of how we’re all accountable to the mundane even as it’s falling apart all around us, and perhaps spectacularly so.

So, the temptation is to describe Rolling Thunder as patient zero to highlight a post-sixties counterculture that had become insular, shabby, indulgent, paranoid and wasted—and had abandoned social justice for it’s time to get mine. There’s an even greater temptation, which I’ve been resisting mightily, to say that Rolling Thunder is a great music documentary, except for the music.

But I happen to be a big fan of Desire, with its swooning dirges and gypsy feel driven by Rivera’s sinewy violin playing. Here’s Dylan drinking “One More Cup of Coffee,” and here he is again writing about the framing of boxer Rubin Carter for murder. He’s got a dirgey blues about mobster Joey Gallo, and a song called “Isis” that isn’t about the beheading terrorists but rather the goddess of the same name.

Still, I left the theater with a funny feeling. Something didn’t add up about the movie. A few things, actually. Turns out I was on to something.

Let’s start with this: Scorsese leans on interviews with Sharon Stone, who recalls her time on the tour after she and her mother met Dylan. The connective tissue that weaves the web together is a Kiss shirt that Stone was allegedly wearing when Dylan met her and her mom. Turns out none of that’s true.

It goes on from there: The bitchy filmmaker identified as Stefan Van Dorp, is actually Bette Midler’s husband. U.S. Rep. Jack Tanner makes an appearance, a tip-off that something is not quite what it seems. Tanner was a fictional creation of HBO in 1988. And, did Scarlet Rivera really date Gene Simmons and did Dylan really go see Kiss in Queens with her, as he claims? Probably not.

I got home after midnight and Rolling Thunder was already up on Netflix, but I didn’t feel like I’d been scammed into buying a ticket, especially since someone else bought it for me. Cool, I thought, I’ll take another spin over the weekend while I’m writing and maybe I’ll have something interesting to add to the discussion. Then the stories started to pop on Variety and other entertainment hot-sheets. Stone was never on the Rolling Thunder tour. Von Dorp, who claims to have shot most of the footage that would ultimately comprise Rolling Thunder, was an actor who never shot anything.

All told, it’s now been reported that Scorsese included about 10 minutes of pure trickster fun in Rolling Thunder, much to the indignant chagrin of film critics like Owen Gleiberman over at Variety who felt betrayed, lied to, and embarrassed for falling for the Scorsese-Dylan ruse.

Dylan’s legendary for his trickster posturing. In the very short time he appears onscreen as a 77-year-old, he props up the Scorsese pranks by failing to shoot them down, and for offering a key aphorism about how nobody tells the truth unless they’re wearing a mask. Stone relates to the interviewer that Dylan told her that he wrote “Just Like A Woman,” in her adolescent honor—with its “breaks just like a little girl” lyric. Stone believed him until someone pointed out to her, she claims, that Dylan had written the song 10 years earlier. Stone’s retelling of Dylan’s lie is so convincing, you’d never stop to think whether the source of the lie was itself, a lie. Which it was.

The built-in pranks raise their own question: What is the suppressed history, that the bullshit should arise? More to the point, why make up a story about Stone when you could talk about folk-singer Phil Ochs?

Ochs was a traveler in New York’s coffeehouse folk scene that gave the world Dylan. Known for his humor, political activism and prolific output as a rousing singer-songwriter of the era, Ochs was also a deeply troubled man who struggled with addiction and depression. I read somewhere that Ochs cooked up the gypsy-carnival conceit of the Rolling Thunder tour with Dylan a couple of years before it launched, but wasn’t invited to the tour.

In the oft-repeated retelling, Ochs was so depressed at the slight that he killed himself. And it’s true that Ochs committed suicide, in April 1976. Some have laid his death at Dylan’s breast—all he would have had to do was bring him on the tour!—but that’s a simplistic, if convenient rewrite.

Ochs’ struggles are vaguely alluded to in an expansive Rolling Stone piece written by Ratso Sloman as the tour kicked off. I’d have liked to see Dylan say something about Ochs—but, really what’s left to say? There’s nothing left from this tour, no legacy, no afterglow—nothing to grab hold on to. That’s not me talking, that’s Bob. There’s nothing left, Dylan croaks at the end of the movie, but dust.

I never thought I’d be the kind of person who eats sauerkraut straight out of the jar. Post apocalypse, maybe. But outside of that scenario, who eats sauerkraut that way?

Sure, Iwelcome a little pickled cabbage into my life, now and then. Who doesn’t?

But last year an astonishing encounter with a popup deli—Great Scott, the chef is grilling the sauerkraut before grilling the Reuben!—inspired a trip to the store for some “authentic” German sauerkraut, to try grilling my own. And I’ve got say, alongside a kielbasa-style veggie sausage and mashed potatoes, it does seem like the right kind of condiment.

But I was surprised when I began to see locally made sauerkraut featured prominently in the fresh deli case at the supermarket. That all changed one day at the California Artisan Cheese Festival, where local purveyors not purveying cheese included products from Sonoma Brinery. Specifically, they offered a taste of their latest product, escabeche, and I took a bite. That crunch, in my mind, echoed throughout Grace Pavilion. Then, I tried the new dill pickle spears. I became woke to the brine.

Escabeche, as it’s experienced hereabouts, is a mix of pickled carrots, onions and jalapeños, and is commonly served in Mexican restaurants and found in the canned food aisles of grocery stores. I like pickled jalapeños, and even serranos when I feel like bringing on the heat, but this was something different. What was it that made it more…alive?

After tracking down a carton of Sonoma Brinery’s escabeche in Oliver’s Market—I’m just noting this because it’s hard to find elsewhere—I confirmed that I love the taste, but I disagreed with the thin-sliced style. I’d prefer quartered spears of jalapeño, like the pickles. Could I make my own? Consulting the oracle of the internet, the answer was, “Yes.”

 Pickling peppers the natural way, by fermentation, is said to be as easy as adding salty water, and waiting a few days. Could it really be that easy? My first batch turned out crunchy and tasty. My second batch, with radishes added, turned bright pink. Was it the radishes, or had something gone awry? 

You can’t believe everything you read on the internet, so I made an appointment with David Ehreth, president and managing partner at Sonoma Brinery, to get the scoop. Ehreth started the company in his garage in 2004 as sort of a retirement project after a career as a telecom executive in Petaluma’s “Telecom Valley,” a phrase he says he helped coin. Today, he doesn’t look much retired—he’s in the middle of a meeting with his sales manager, plus half a dozen other things, in a good sized commercial building in Healdsburg.

Ehreth says his was one of the first serious brineries on the scene, predating Santa Rosa’s Wildbrine and Farmhouse Culture of Santa Cruz.

“We were the first guy to show up with a live cultured, fermented pickle,” says Ehreth. “And in our other hand, a live cultured sauerkraut.”

They’re all competitors of sorts, but each specializes in different products. Ehreth explains that at first he aimed for a niche that didn’t compete with existing products in the stores he was pitching.

“I’m here to make your pickle sales increase,” he’d say, “not simply replace an existing product.”

Existing products include pickles and other vegetables are processed using either vinegar or heat-treated after fermentation.

So what is fermentation, if it’s not the kind that produces alcohol, like wine or beer?

“If I can go nerd on you for a moment,” Ehreth warns, before diving into a synopsis about the lactobacillus bacteria that exist on the surface of all fresh vegetables. “You can’t remove them by washing.” What’s more, they immediately begin to feed and reproduce—but not in a bad way, unless they’re a bad actor, he insists

“Those bacteria will really stake out their turf,” says Ehreth. “They’re very territorial. They go to war with each other.” The incredible part of it is that the four horsemen of the food industry—listeria, E. Coli, botulinum, and salmonella—are on lactobacilli’s hit list. None survive. Five bacteria enter—one bacterium leaves.

Quoting the Food and Drug Administration, Ehreth states, “There has been no documented transmission of pathogens by fermented vegetables.”

The problem with my pink batch of pickled peppers, Ehreth suggests, may have been wild yeast getting a toehold—red is a sign of yeast.

“When you buy Sonoma Brinery,” he says, “you are buying a level of expertise.”

Pickles don’t have to be translucent and soggy, like some home-fermented pickles I’ve graciously accepted but never finished eating, or store-bought pickles that are pickled in vinegar.

“You need surplus to make vinegar,” Ehreth explains, recounting the demise of fresh pickling. Before World War II, vinegar was made from comparatively precious products like wine and apple cider. After the war, there was an abundance of nitrogen fertilizer on hand. Armed with this, farmers created a surplus of corn and grains, and one of the things you can do with grain is make cheap, distilled white vinegar. Producers said, “Look at this, we don’t have to ferment.” 

Vinegar works very fast—fermentation at Sonoma Brinery takes 8–15 days.

The other difference is that almost all jalapeño products are heat processed, says Ehreth, and there’s no way you can heat treat and not adversely affect the texture of a jalapeño.

The escabeche was the one product he didn’t create. They had launched their curtido, a Central-American style sauerkraut, and had some jalapeños around, so production manager Mayra Madrigal tried a batch of escabeche.

“It was so good it made my head explode,” says Ehreth.

Sonoma Brinery sources conventionally farmed pickling cucumbers, according to Ehreth, because the organic kind are unicorns—the nation’s largest pickle buyer buys conventional pickles for its burgers, so there isn’t much incentive for growers to go organic until so goes Mickey D’s.

In his spartan kitchen and office, Rick Goldberg of Wildbrine is finishing up a test project, scooping batter from a mixing bowl. On one counter, an earthenware crock is burping slowly with another new project. But while Goldberg’s office, which he shares with business partner Chris Glab, has the feel of a startup, it’s one of the nation’s largest fermented food startups to date.

Outside, employees whiz by, riding on electric pallet jacks, moving half-ton bins of plastic-wrapped product on shipping pallets to and fro. It’s a much larger operation than Sonoma Brinery, although the building is shared with HenHouse Brewing and another company.

This isn’t Goldberg’s first food venture.

“I was retired,” says Goldberg. “I wasn’t looking to go back to work.”

Previously, he and Glab turned a bagel-and-cream cheese wholesale business to food trucks into a multi-million dollar cheese spread and salsa business (remember Sonoma Salsa?), selling it to a larger company in 2006, which later was absorbed by yet another company.

Goldberg volunteered at the Ceres Community Project in Sebastopol, which brings wholesome meals to people facing serious illnesses, with the help of high school students. There, he learned about the health benefits of probiotic, fermented foods, and began packaging fermented foods as a “one or two day a week thing,” to sell in a few local stores. It’d be a little project for his retirement, and make a few bucks for Ceres.

Eight years later, Wildbrine is hand-chopping and machine-chopping through some 5 million pounds of organic cabbage a year, distributing it throughout the U.S., Canada and Japan, and, according to Goldberg, it is the biggest selling brand in its category according to market data that doesn’t include Whole Foods—although they certainly have a big presence there.

“When I grew up, we were always out playing in the dirt,” Goldberg says, musing about the bugs in our biota. “We had our hands dirty, and then we’d grab a sandwich. I think we over-sanitized our gut, and realized we had made a mistake.”

That being said, Wildbrine follows an exacting protocol of sanitation for employees and visitors: I must don a beard net, hair net, plus booties for my shoes, and a smock in order to tour kraut factory.

At 10:30am, there’s already a full sheet of batches logged and tested. They’ll pack 35,000 pounds of kimchi today, all of it weighed by hand and adjusted by employees with contents from a half-ton bin filled with something that looks like spilled pizza. It’s amazing that this spicy mix contains no tomatoes.

Wildbrine’s newest products use surplus cabbage leaves from their kimchi and sauerkraut process, but the culture is fermented with cashew nuts to make a simulacrum of Brie cheese and butter. The result is darker than brie, with a texture akin to halvah, but the bloomy rind is spot-on in aroma. The butter is kind of in between hummus and foie gras—it would go well on a bagel.

Wild West Ferments also has its origins in health concerns. Around the time that co-founders Maggie Levinger and Luke Regalbuto met while attending Humboldt State University, Levinger’s mother was diagnosed with colon cancer, spurring their interest in intestinal health and probiotic foods.

After college, the couple traveled in Eastern Europe and Latin America, experiencing fermented foods like smreka in Bosnia and kisli kupis in Romania, while working in organic farms through the WOOF program. They began fermenting foods in the kitchen of an Inverness restaurant, and sold their products at farmers markets. Four years ago, they took it up a notch.

Behind a shuttered storefront in Petaluma, formerly a French restaurant, Regalbuto and three workers are grating cabbage and carrots to make “24 Carrot Gold,” a carrot-heavy sauerkraut. Wild West is a decidedly more small-scale outfit than the others, but they’ve got their niche—and this is the first brinery visit where I can smell some real brine, from my first step through the door.

Regalbuto shows me to the fermentation room, which must have formerly been the dining room—the faux-textured paint job does lend the scene an Old World feel, and it’s filled with brown, earthenware crocks imported from Germany. Is that a burp I just heard? Yes, Regalbuto says, the fermentations are burping away through a seal of water on the jar lids. They’re a pain to maintain, he says, but it’s worth it.

“Now, the others won’t like me talking about this,” says Regalbuto, before explaining that he feels that plastic may not be the ideal medium in which to ferment raw foods. But to each his own.

Selling at farmers markets in San Rafael and Point Reyes Station, Wild West just recently got back into the new regime at Whole Foods, requiring a big jump in production from this small business, which ferments for six weeks—a bit longer than the others.

Waving his hand like a stadium fan, Regalbuto describes the arc of flavors and competing microbes that rise, then fall, in epochs during fermentation—it’s kind of like naturally fermented wine.

Each of these brineries have their own repertoire, whether heavy on the radish, like Wild West, or spicy with the kimchi, like Wildrine. The signature sauerkraut is the telling one—Wild West’s is more finely chopped, herbal and floral than others, highlighting coriander spice, while Wildbrine’s is coarse and juicy, with a garlicky aftertaste.

Maybe it’s all about the different recipes, and the sourcing of produce. But also, like Goldberg told me toward the end of my visit  at Wildbrine, “It’s really a piece of magic, it’s not just science.” Y

West Marin writer and mentor Anne Cushman has been a staple of the North Bay mindfulness community for 30 years, primarily as a member of the Teachers’ Council at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodcare, and as a private yoga and meditation teacher and mentor for other educators.

She’s also one of the most established voices in the meditation community as a former longtime editor for Yoga Journal and other publications; and as an author, publishing guides and novels such as From Here to Nirvana (1998) and Enlightenment for Idiots (2008).

“My life took root here,” says Cushman, who moved to Marin in 1989. “It seems to be the epicenter of so many things I am interested in. I have a strong community and work that I love.”

For the last two decades, Cushman has also been a mother, and that part of her life is illuminated in her newly published memoir, The Mama Sutra, which Cushman reads from on Saturday, June 15, at Book Passage in Corte Madera.

“Motherhood is like meditation and yoga in that it brings us into an immediate and visceral connection with the most mysterious aspects of human life,” says Cushman. “And it’s also very common, a fundamental human experience that is so ordinary and so mysterious at the same time.”

Her book chronicles a path of motherhood that is filled with both love and loss, from Cushman’s first pregnancy and her daughter’s tragic stillbirth, to the birth of her son and the challenges and gifts of his developmental differences.

The stories told in The Mama Sutra were culled from years of note taking and journaling about motherhood that Cushman began writing early on.

“When I got pregnant, it occurred to me that the journey into and through motherhood could be considered a kind of pilgrimage,” says Cushman. “And as a writer, I thought I would take notes on that journey just as when I traveled.”

By using details from specific conversations and events that took place over Cushman’s journey of motherhood..

“I think it’s struck a chord with women in terms of honoring the full range of experience that happens as a mother,” says Cushman. “And looking at it as a path of transformation in a conscious way.”

Anne Cushman reads and appears in conversation with Mariana Caplan on Saturday, June 15, at Book Passage, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera. 11am. Free. 415.927.0960.