Northern California’s premier cannabis destination for the last 15 years, the Emerald Cup has secured a place in pot history with its respected competition, eclectic entertainment and ever-present commitment to honoring organic, outdoor cannabis.
For the first time, this year’s Emerald Cup, taking place Dec. 15–16 at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds in Santa Rosa, is commencing in a state where cannabis is now legal and recreational. While that may sound like a one-way ticket to the biggest pot party on the planet, Emerald Cup founder Tim Blake and his team have found 2018 to be anything but smooth.
“It’s been a very challenging legalization,” says Blake. “The state wasn’t ready to give out permits; people were jumping through hoops. For the Cup, we had to spend a lot of time and money on lobbyists and working with the BCC [Bureau of Cannabis Control] to ensure that we could run it the way it’s always been run.”
With cannabis being consumed, judged in competition and purchased at the Cup, the organizers had to develop a working relationship with the new state regulators, who Blake says were not yet set up to handle the licensing and regulations required to host an event this size. The Emerald Cup last year hosted around 50,000 attendees, and this year’s cannabis competition has received 500 entries.
“Across the board it’s been challenging, whether you’re a dispensary, distribution company, nursery—it has been really something,” says Blake, who estimates that only a few hundred permits for cultivation have been issued for places in Mendocino and Humboldt County, where there are more than 10,000 farmers.
After spending much of the year educating the BCC about how the cannabis is judged, transported, stored, sold and consumed at the Emerald Cup, Blake is grateful to announce that all aspects of the event are still in place.
“We had to make them realize this is a critical aspect to our industry,” says Blake. “Not only the Emerald Cup, but all the cannabis events held around the state—small farmers depend on it.”
As with every year, the Emerald Cup prides itself on being an organic cannabis competition. This year, the Cup is expanding with new categories for licensed products like edibles, topicals, concentrates and tinctures, and is including a “Personal Use Grower” category, allowing an opportunity for everyone with a talent for growing cannabis to participate.
The Cup is also handing out its annual lifetime achievement award, this year honoring music legend and cannabis ambassador Willie Nelson. “Willie epitomizes the cannabis industry, the struggle we’ve gone through the last 50 years,” says Blake. “If there’s ever a person that could be called a true OG, who’s been there and been openly, publicly fighting for us, it would be Willie.”
The Country Music Hall of Famer has long been an advocate for the consumption and legalization of marijuana. He’s even got his own recreational cannabis company, Willie’s Reserve. Blake reached out to Nelson for several years about the lifetime achievement award, which has been a feature of the Cup for more than a decade, though, reportedly, Nelson spends the winter in Hawaii. “This year, he’s decided to come back and join us, accept that award,” says Blake. “He also gave us permission to change the name of the award to the Willie Nelson Award, and he’ll be the first recipient of it. I am beyond honored and humbled that Willie and his team would look at the Emerald Cup, vet us out and decide that we’re a class enough act that he would have his name attached to us forever. It’s one of the proudest moments I’ve had with the Cup.”
Nelson will be honored during the Cup’s award ceremony on Sunday, Dec. 16. And while he’s not scheduled to perform, his appearance tops the bill of a stacked lineup of music and comedy that’s running all weekend.
The Cup’s reputation for partying is legendary, and last year boasted groups like the Roots and the Pimps of Joytime. This year’s headliners include New Orleans legends Dirty Dozen Brass Band making noise on both Saturday and Sunday, veteran gypsy punks Gogol Bordello on Saturday, and hip-hop duo Big Gigantic on Sunday. Other live acts include Nashville-based country singer-songwriter Margo Price, recently nominated for the Grammy for Best New Artist; Brooklyn-based Afrobeat kings Antibalas; Bay Area hip-hop star Lyrics Born; Santa Cruz electronic collective STS9; and many others.
The Cup also welcomes actor Jason Mewes and writer-director Kevin Smith, better known as Jay and Silent Bob in Smith’s cult classic films Clerks, Mall Rats, Chasing Amy and others. The hilarious duo have recently taken to podcasting, and their show Jay & Silent Bob Get Old, is ranked No. 1 on iTunes Comedy podcasts. Fans can see them live onstage Saturday telling stories and cracking jokes.
Another newcomer to the Cup is standup comedian Doug Benson, who co-hosts the entertainment with Cup veteran Ngaio Bealum. Benson has become cannabis’ official comedian ever since he starred in the 2008 documentary Super High Me, where he explored the effects of smoking cannabis for 30 days.
Beyond the entertainment, the Cup is stacked with guest speakers like chief of the Bureau of Medical Cannabis Regulation Lori Ajax, director of cultivation science at Steep Hill Lab Lydia Abernethy, industrial hemp consultant Chris Conrad, and a wide swath of lawyers, growers and business developers.
Other topics up for discussion include the social-justice aspects of cannabis, regenerative and sustainable farming, spirituality and more. Blake is personally excited to welcome psychedelic researchers and experts to talk about their work in medicinal psychedelics. Under the guise of healing, and with the right methodology, Blake says that psychedelics could be the next frontier in treating depression and mental illness.
“The FDA recently approved psilocybin mushrooms research for depression,” says Blake. “It’s a very big topic. Michael Pollan just wrote a best-selling book on it, How to Change Your Mind. And right now we’re coming full circle not only with cannabis, but looking back on how the positive benefits of psychedelics got overlooked by the demonization.”
With so much happening, Blake compares the Emerald Cup to the Lollapalooza of cannabis, and the overall experience promises to entertain, educate and inspire the community with a focus on inclusiveness and cooperation.
“I’m more excited than ever,” says Blake. “I thought we’d play ourselves out, but here we are in our 15th year, and I feel like, boy, we’re just getting our legs under us.”
The Emerald Cup takes off Saturday and Sunday, Dec. 15–16, at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds, 1350 Bennett Valley Road, Santa Rosa. General admission opens 10am each day. $80 and up; 21 or over only. theemeraldcup.com.

An online search for “Tiburon” and “infamous” unsurprisingly yields a bounty of entries devoted to nearby Alcatraz Island. But as I discovered recently, there are a number of other infamous indicators online that provide for a handy spotlight into this wealthy enclave along the Bay.

One can’t get to Alcatraz directly from Tiburon, but stay at the Lodge at Tiburon and there’s a ferry that takes visitors across the shark-infested waters to Fisherman’s Wharf, where another ferry’s waiting for a trip to the prison, whose most infamous inmate may well have been Al Capone.

Tiburon hasn’t produced felons on the order of a Capone, but as Socketsite reported in 2016, an “infamous Tiburon mansion” sold that year at a price-reduced $12 million. The Gilmartin Drive manse had been the site of not one, but two separate and distinct spasms of white-collar crime—in 1999 and again in 2007—which involved Ukrainians, diamonds, Chinese telecom, an FBI raid, and millions of stolen dollars.

Tiburon’s loaded with luxe homes that feature outstanding views of the San Francisco Bay—and which drove an intense battle in town over a 2017 proposal by some residents to coax their neighbors into spending bazillions of dollars to pay PG&E to bury the power lines to improve the views (and perhaps stop a fire in its tracks?). Numerous not-bazillionaire opponents to the plan shared their public comments with the township, including one resident who lamented those “infamous” Tiburon zoning ordinances that are designed to protect, if not enhance the views at all cost!

You can see, however, why some folks want to bury the power lines and spend all their time gawking at unobstructed views of San Francisco bay. The firm Mahoney Architects recently posted a photo that’s a big hit on the luxe-home online circuit of gawkery. On its website, the firm brags cheekily of “our infamous Tiburon window seat” (pictured) as being part of a magazine spread at Houzz.com.

As anyone can plainly see, that bench is inspiring and peaceful and looks like the perfect place to take a nap after a huge meal at the Tiburon classic Don Antonio’s—which also gets not one, but two nods to the power of online infamy. An online posting shared by the restaurant on its website celebrated Don Antonio’s staying power in a town with an “infamous attrition” rate for restaurants. And a Yelper howled with joy after a meal at Don Antonio’s about the Italian joint’s “infamous Bolognese.” Don Antonio’s has now joined my growing, if not infamous, list of must-eat-at Marin destinations—and which reminds me that Tiburon, besides translating into “shark,” also means “gluttony” in Spanish.

And there’s nothing like a long bike ride through the towns and hills of Marin County to counteract the sinful effects of gluttony on one’s mind and body—which is where the late Tiburon resident Robin Williams comes into this tale of infamy. Williams was an avid bicyclist in the county, and a 2014 remembrance after his suicide that ran in the Hollywood Reporter noted that Williams used to ride around Marin all the time on customized bikes, his “infamous body hair” providing a hilarious contrast to the shaved legs of other road cyclists.

“THE FUTURE IS RIDING ON METRO”

Never had I ever read such a prescient message as the one stamped at the bottom of my rail-ticket receipt. It was Oct. 27, and I had just bought a SmarTrip card at the Metrorail’s Reagan Airport station in Washington, D.C., and was on my way to a big conference about the benefits and problems that ensue when a new commuter train comes to town.

I was in D.C. to report how the conference’s findings might intersect with the Sonoma Marin Area Rail Transit system that’s been running up and down the North Bay for the past year, with lots of questions buzzing around about what it will mean for the region moving forward. In linking Santa Rosa with San Rafael, can SMART be seen as an arbiter of what’s to come for a region crippled by an ongoing absence of affordable housing? Alas, yes.

I have a personal and professional affinity for train travel. I was, ten years ago, an intern at the Central Japan Railway Company (aka JR Central). One of JR Central’s subsidiaries, Nippon Sharyo, performed the final assembly of SMART’s rolling stock at its Illinois plant. JR Central was hosting a reunion event in the nation’s capital for all former interns, and I was invited to the all-expense-paid junket. The event included a conference at K&L Gates—the law firm that represents JR Central domestically—followed by a reception at the swank St. Regis hotel.

I hopped on a plane to learn more about how JR Central’s business might affect train travel moving forward for SMART—well, especially for millennial SMART riders of the scrappy freelancer variety, who can barely afford to live in the North Bay as it is, but who love to ride the train whenever possible.

There was the big takeaway from the Washington conference. For all the talk of “transit-oriented development” in the North Bay, for all the civic concern about affordable housing, workforce housing, tiny homes, rent control and etc., the research points in one direction when it comes to commuter trains: they drive up real-estate prices in regions where they’ve been built.

It’s no fault of the train systems, of course, and SMART faces its own affordable-housing problem as a company in need of a reliable, and preferably local, workforce that it can retain.

“There are many instances of transit-oriented [development] nationwide that include affordable housing,” says SMART spokeswoman Jeanne Mariani-Belding via email. “Those land-use issues typically rest with local jurisdictions. Businesses throughout the North Bay, including SMART, are feeling the effects of the lack of affordable housing and the challenges that creates in terms of hiring and retaining people.”

SMART has been rolling along for just over a year, offering lots of discounts and fairly priced monthly passes for commuters, and when I took my parents on the green machines this August, plenty of riders were traveling north to and from San Rafael, for work and fun.

Despite a few notable collisions involving pedestrians and trucks, the much-delayed SMART rollout has been a success, and a net positive for the region. But the success may also herald a less-than-desirable new challenge for North Bay residents. When the commuter rail comes to a region, the price of housing tends to go up, and then up some more. That’s a critical issue for a region that is struggling mightily to square up its housing scene to sync with the promise of a 21st-century SMART rail system that’s accessible and affordable to all.

It was a cold, blustery day in the nation’s capital that suggested a harsh winter was right around the corner. The White House was a sad sight with all the extra security and barricades that extended 70 feet from the main wrought-iron fence, to say nothing of its occupant.

Circling back around to K&L Gates, I stepped into a conference room full of JR Central employees, former interns and my Japanese-American relations professor from Vanderbilt, James Auer. He made it possible for students like me to participate in the internship. After a few minutes of greetings, we sat at our assigned seats to find materials detailing JR Central’s latest advancements in maglev technology, and the company’s impressive growth in the decade since I interned.

The first speaker was deputy general manager Rikuhei Daimon, who organized the reunion. Telling us that we would always be members of the JR Central family, he introduced Masahiro Nakayama, JR Central’s general manager in the United States. Nakayama filled our heads with visions of the N700S Shinkansen, the train model that in the near future will connect Dallas and Houston in 90 high-speed minutes. Neat.

The most eye-opening talk—and the one that’s very relevant to North Bay residents—was given by rail researcher Mike Schlicting, a former JR Central intern and a current doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

Schlicting discussed his research into the economic impact of reliable passenger rail on economically depressed and underdeveloped areas. The findings are clear, he said: when a city has access to fast and dependable rail transportation, rents and real estate prices go through the roof. Poorer residents are pushed out, replaced by urban professionals. How far through the roof do prices skyrocket? He exclaimed that the prices of commercial and residential real estate rose “from $5 a square foot, to $20 or $30 dollars a square foot.”

As he spoke, any idea of owning a home in the North Bay devolved from dim hope to cruel joke. And he just kept talking. Schlicting showed attendees before-and-after photos of western Washington, D.C., that illustrated the effects of what happened when the Metro line was extended. This was a part of town where you never wanted to get caught after dark, he reported, which now boasts high-density, high-rent apartment clusters over each station. The buildings are typically 15 to 20 stories, and the clusters looked like their own mini cities.

Schlicting’s presentation evoked the regional mantra about high-density development in urban areas: the model could support the continuance of the regionally accepted wisdom of urban-growth boundaries—if North Bay residents are willing to accept a SMART corridor that’s dotted with tall apartment buildings at every train stop and that abandons any pretext that those buildings will be set aside for local workforce housing.

When it comes to passenger rail systems, Schlicting stressed that they are not built for the people who live in the region; they are built for people who are going to move their to pursue new economic opportunities. Without attendant population growth, systems such as SMART can’t sustain themselves and risk becoming another Napa Wine Train.

Schlicting wasn’t alone with the words of warning. Every speaker’s message clashed with the current reality in Sonoma and Marin counties: new rail lines only make sense as long as local communities along the route invest heavily in affordable housing. Until that day happens, SMART will remain a niche product.

Santa Rosa’s Press Democrat has already been reporting that one of SMART’s most significant challenges is that it appeals mainly to the “white and well-off.” Many of today’s riders choose to use SMART even though they could drive.

The conference broke up and we headed to the St. Regis’ James Monroe Room, where JR Central hosted a swanky shindig. I approached general manager Nakayama, and we talked a bit about the company’s rolling stock, its cars. How would the company deal with domestic orders for new cars now that Nippon Sharyo no longer operates a factory in the United States? He said the company would try to honor its previous price structure for open contracts. His answer implied that prices had nowhere to go but up, but what else is new?

I assured Nakayama that Sonoma and Marin county residents appreciated that they had an alternative to the jam-packed highway, high gas prices and road rage. We happily chatted about the beautiful Northern California scenery and how he or another JR Central manager travels here once or twice a year to check up on SMART.

Keep on checking. New SMART train cars might be added to accommodate demand, and train tickets may get pricier in coming years. And if the conference experts are right, the northern Sonoma County real estate market should boom when the train line is expanded north—for better and worse.

I asked SMART to weigh in on this irony: Even as the railroad struggles to retain its workforce—because of the high cost of living in the North Bay—rail experts maintain that the commuter system is itself driving up the cost of living here. The SMART response was to send links to its fare schedule and to note that the railroad does provide steep discounts to senior and student riders.

I’d suggest readers of lesser means start saving up for that $400,000 chicken-shack in affordable-for-now Cloverdale. And I’ll join with fellow millennials as we keep our fingers crossed for some SMART-adjacent affordable housing to emerge, somewhere along the gentrified line. Who knows, maybe it will. Petaluma? Novato? Santa Rosa?

Here’s hoping—but I’ll believe it when I see it.