“Princes come, princes go,” sings Omar Khayyam at the start of the long-lost musical Kismet, now playing at Spreckels Performing Arts Center. The same sentiment can be said of Broadway shows like this one. A huge hit in 1953, the Arabian-themed romance is largely unknown today.
In Spreckels Theatre Company’s nostalgia-driven new production—full of vibrant costumes, outstanding singing and lush orchestral music—it becomes simultaneously clear why the show is of such limited interest today, and why that’s also a bit of a shame.
Set in ancient Baghdad during the time of poet Omar Khayyam (Jeremy Berrick), the musical blends original songs by Robert Wright and George Forrest with reworked pieces by the 19th century Russian composer Alexander Borodin, whose 1890 opera Prince Igor was largely rewritten for Kismet, adding a new story and wholly original lyrics to Borodin’s sweeping melodies. Kismet’s story, based on a non-musical stage play from 1911, follows a poor poet (Tim Setzer, charmingly spot-on), who arrives in Baghdad with his daughter Marsinah (an electrifyingly good Carmen Mitchell) just as the prince (a somewhat stiff but gorgeously voiced Jacob Bronson) is reluctantly shopping for a princess, with candidates from surrounding kingdoms arriving by the score. Soon arrested for a petty crime, the poet attempts to save himself from the harsh punishments of the law-enforcing Wazir (Harry Duke, in a hilarious and richly entertaining performance), by passing himself off as a powerful sorcerer, simultaneously pursuing a reckless affair with the Wazir’s primary wife LaLume (Brenda Reed, sexy and scary all at once).
Meanwhile, Marsinah accidentally meets the prince, who, for various slightly unbelievable reasons, assumes she’s a visiting princess, just as she assumes that he’s a gardener. They fall in love to the show’s most recognizable tune, “Stranger in Paradise,” setting up a series of events that become frequently tangled, and a bit silly, right up until the story’s slightly shocking climax.
The choreography, by Michella Snider, is energetic and fun, though frequently frenetic and jumbled. But there’s something freeing about it, especially given that in this “staged concert” version of the play, the 11-piece orchestra, under the musical direction of Diego Garcia, is right there on stage surrounded by actors and singers.
It’s clever, at times thrilling, and even a bit dazzling.
Ultimately, Kismet still turns out to be not much of a play, with a dated premise, thin characters and a preposterous plot, plus some outrageously nonsensical dialogue, as when one character says, “He who looks through three windows sees more than one olive tree,” or when another states, “It is only those who love well whom love can hurt.”
Still, rising above all of that, the cast is uniformly marvelous, and as directed by Gene Abravaya with a sweet simplicity and an emphasis on the lovely but hardly memorable music, there is a bit of welcome sorcery on display at all times, bringing this lost artifact from the Golden Days of Broadway back to life with plenty of warmth, color, contagious enthusiasm and genuine love.
NOW PLAYING: Kismet runs Thursday–Sunday through February 28 at Spreckels Performing Arts Center, 5409 Snyder St., Rohnert Park; Fri.-Sat., 8pm; 2pm matinees on Sunday; $16-$26. 707/588-3400.
When Alex and Lisa Stricker took over the Flatiron in 2013, the longtime watering hole received a major facelift. The San Rafael institution was transformed into a cleaner, brighter sports bar that maintained its convivial, inviting vibe but with better food and less grunginess. When the couple announced that they had bought the nearby Broken Drum on Fourth Street and planned to bring on both an accomplished chef and brewer, I had high hopes.
Though vestiges of the previous brewpub linger, State Room Brewery, Bar & Kitchen has enlivened this downtown spot with a sexy backlit bar, eclectic menu and a young, energetic waitstaff. Chairs painted Kelly green, high-top tables and grey fabric-clad booths are all part of the eatery’s newly modern sensibility. Music is loud and busy servers—clad in skinny black jeans and T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan, ‘In Beer We Trust’—are attentive and earnest.
More brewery/bar than restaurant, State Room, unsurprisingly, boasts beer that shines. I sampled their Franklins Tower IPA—a near perfect blend of malt, yeast and floral hops. All of the house-made beers are available in half pints, pints, flights and pitchers. An Altered State Triple also hit all the right notes. Again, not a surprise, as the brewer cut his teeth at places like Sierra Nevada and most recently, at Iron Springs.
I wanted to love the food as much as the beer—but I didn’t. Knowing chef Ed Vigil’s food well from his time at Vin Antico, I was surprised and confused by the offerings. A handful of starters that range from pork buns, cheesy pretzels and a couple of overcooked strips of Korean style skirt steak (meant to be rolled in lettuce leaves and doused with a five-spice sauce), to sashimi and deviled eggs had me scratching my head. Small plates feature meatballs, a generous portion of cubed, but not crispy potatoes slathered in a spicy harissa aioli, tempura crawfish and a few obligatory salads.
Hands down the best items on the menu are the blistered pizzas fresh from the newly installed wood-fire oven. A flawless Margarita Mezzo Secco showcased just the right amounts of san marzano tomatoes, basil, dry jack cheese, burrata and chili flakes. A Farmers’ Market option features seasonal offerings, and a house-made pesto with cippolini onions, fennel, sausage and arugula couldn’t have been better.
Considering that State Room has only been open for a month, it’s doing remarkably well. With a few tweaks to the menu (the Asian items are a disconnect at an American brewpub, and where’s the burger?) and a planned beer garden in the front of the brewery—I have little doubt that it will eventually hit its stride.
State Room Brewery, Bar & Kitchen, 1132 Fourth Street, San Rafael; 415/295-7929; stateroombrewery.com.
There’s a sturdy and well-appointed beach shack along the California coast. The precise details of its location, should they be publicized, would likely mean the end of the shack at the hands of The Man, so let’s just say that it is somewhere between Santa Cruz and Jenner—or, even better, somewhere between San Diego and the Oregon border. It’s out there—way the freak out there. Don’t try to find it, and if you do … shhhh. It’s our little secret.
It takes a bit of work to get to this small, driftwood shack, built above the high-tide line and nestled in a wee cove. Since its construction commenced last January, it has survived the El Niño and king tides, crashing driftwood jumbles, high winds, tumbling boulders, scouring sun and the erosion, always the erosion. You’ve heard of a blowdown stack—this is a blowdown shack, a well-built domicile for a human in search of a place to blow off steam or crash for the night; a special place. But I can’t stress this enough: Shhh, don’t tell the Coastal Commission about it … the builder didn’t have the proper permits!
The shack’s contents speak to a simple life lived on the square. There are Dick Francis and Carl Hiaasen novels on a shelf, dog-eared and a little sodden. There are a couple of first-aid kits, fully tricked out with ointments and cold packs for any low-level cut or scrape or twisted ankle that might befall a visitor. A journal, soaked from the rain, is stashed in a cooler and filled with wonder and gratitude and loopy penmanship. It tells of people who came a long distance and enjoyed the place, and left something behind or did something to improve the lot of mankind. One characteristic entry reads, All good manfolk and womanfolk are welcome here to share the bounty of the sea with the various native seabirds, pelicans, osprey, terns and seagulls fishing from these waters. Watch for seals also fishing in the kelp beds, and faraway sailboats going where the winds take them …
The shack’s builder also constructed a perch on the roof that provides a million-dollar view of the ocean. But let’s not put a dollar sign on everything.
I’ve come to this shack several times to chill out and stare at the Pacific Ocean awhile. Others come for outlaw overnight good times on the driftwood bunk. I love me a good beach shack and have built a few in my time. Visitors to the shack occupy a key place in the freedom-trail culture of the nook, experts in sussing and creating these hidden slipstreams of refuge for wild-living fun-seekers, outlaw hikers and marginal artist-campers on the scruff wind, trying to stay on the coast at all costs—with an emphasis on the cost.I am a proud, unreconstructed beach bum, and these are my people.
The shack is a cultural signifier and a furtive line in the sand that denotes, however anonymously, the raging “class” issue of beach access in California, now under fire as the powerful state Coastal Commission moved to axe its popular executive director, Dr. Charles Lester, last week. That move has raised, as they say, serious questions about the future of the 1972 California Coastal Act that set a course for free public access to the California coastline (and which created the commission to ensure that access).
Lester supporters, who came out in droves to support him last week, saw the ouster as part of a concerted effort to denude the California Coastal Act of its radical push for free access to all of California’s beaches, despite one’s income, race or smelly feet. They viewed it as a putsch engineered by Gov. Jerry Brown, in the service of developers itching to take advantage of the state’s suddenly robust economy, or at least that’s what the luxe-humping California bureau of the New York Times suggested. It was a coup!
As the Coastal Commission worried over the Lester firing and insisted that, no, this was a personnel issue centered on Lester’s management style, his organizational shortfalls, that sort of thing, not a “coup”—I bounced out to the shack on a breezy, clear day. The tide was on the ebb—you can’t get here on the flood without risking peril—and I spent a while reading through the journal from the cooler that also contained a couple of cans of tuna fish, a lantern, instructions on how to catch a crab and a few other useful odds and edible ends.
A prior visitor had arranged rain-beating tarps inside the shack and on the roof, which now bulged with gathered water in a couple of places. I emptied the tarps and sloshed water all over myself doing so—classic. Ate an orange, took a bracing 30-second plunge in the surf, and after a while, I sealed the journal in a plastic bag and sat and watched and listened. The only sound that you could hear was the crashing ocean, which is the only sound that I wanted to hear.
And so as humanity teeters on the presumptive edge of a self-made oblivion, the poignancy of the must-have coastal life is, more and more, experienced in the sharp relief of Mother Nature taking her vengeance, even if she’s just doing her thang. We are all eroding together—all of us, rich and poor—and so who will have the front-row end-times seat atop a bluff or along the shore when the Big Erosion really sets in? Well, rich people, that’s who. And so I declare: Beach bum Bolsheviks of the world, unite!
I made my way back home from the shack and later that night, I wondered if anyone had written about it before. I had heard that there had been an encampment of several such shacks near this spot in the good ol’ days, but that once word got out, The Man came and tore them down.
A small, hard-to-get-to beach shack on the California coast provides a ‘million-dollar view of the ocean.’ Staff photo.
At this shack, people are packing it in, and they are packing it out. It truly is a communal space, a temporary autonomous zone for drifters and wayfarers, and it’s doing zero harm to the environment. Why does The Man care so much about what marginal, peaceful people are doing with their time?
Because it’s an outlaw beachside hotel and everyone else pays their share to enjoy the California coast? Not according to the Coastal Act’s mandate. Is it a Bernie Sanders free-stuff shack for lazy commies as we stand at the cusp of a national Dr. Zhivago moment? Seize the property and redistribute to the beach proletariat! Perhaps. But for now, it takes work and a high tolerance for a life lived rugged to find, and fully appreciate, this shack. It is a populist pop-up redoubt, a Trump Tower for the rest of us. Leave us alone.
The shack speaks to exactly what went down in this recent Coastal Commission set-to about the coast: Who owns the view, and who governs access to a sacred solitude that often arrives as entitlement on the wings of dollars?
I wanted to know if anyone had written about the shack, so I typed a few words into the Google machine and was directed to a “pirate shack” on a vacation home-sharing platform. Wow, I thought—somebody is renting this place out?!
Of course not. The Google offering was a quiet, remote, top-of-the-bluff shack down some goat trail in Magical Marin, and it was listed for—wait for it—$285 a night. And there are those who would pay that fee, claim the world-class view for themselves and resent the hell out of anybody who tries to abscond with it without paying their “fair” share for that selfsame view.
Too bad for those terrorists of the view; we have our shack. It will never make the pages of Architectural Digest. It’s rough-hewn and extremely beachy. It is, by definition, ramshackle.
We’re all out here on the edge, but just because your name is The Edge—well, that doesn’t give you special privileges. Or maybe it does. Last year the Coastal Commission gave a very high-profile green light to the U2 guitarist who, after a 10-year battle with his adopted California and its beach bureaucrats, got approval for a five-building manse-spread on what had been a pristine Malibu bluff. In the course of fighting for the building permits, The Edge donated $1 million to a local conservancy in exchange for them not weighing in on his proposal—which is to say that he paid them hush money—but shhh, don’t tell anyone, The Edge is a good liberal. He don’t mean no harm.
Meanwhile, our humble little shack stands proud, in the name of a different kind of love: The love for unfettered and free access to the beach without payoffs and ultra-luxe vulgarities. The Coastal Commission would likely plotz at the idea of a free hang-space for free-minded souls to hang their freak flag, smoke some mother nature and get naked in the sand. But this is exactly the constituency that drove the emergence of the Coastal Act in the first place, and the beach bum constituency ought to be front and center in any discussion about the future of access to California’s beaches.
Here’s a little perspective on the vast California coastline. I’ve done a lot of outlaw hiking and camping over the years, most of it on the East Coast. To that end, I used to spend a lot of time traipsing around the variously accessible beaches of Long Island.
One time about 20 years ago, I hiked the entire South Shore of the island, mostly along the barrier beaches that would later get pummeled during Hurricane Sandy. One thing I learned is that when you carry a fishing pole, you’re not camping (illegal) you’re fishing (legal), and that’s cool. Most nights along that hike I found a spot in the dunes that was removed from the prying headlights of roving beach buggies occupied by The Man. They do not take kindly to bums on the beaches of Long Island.
One night it was around twilight and I was in the deep, deep Hamptons, which, for our purposes, can be considered the Malibu of the Long Island coastline. Very rich, very exclusive and very, very entitled. I was a little concerned at the lack of available furtive campsites, as the houses along this stretch are right up on the beach.
The general rule of beach access here and in New York is that even if a beach is indeed “private,” all are “public” below the high-tide mark. But you can’t realistically sleep in the frothing surf-line.
And even if you could, you’d first have to get on the beach, and the high-toned Hitlers of the Hamptons figured out long ago that the best way to deal with the private-not-private beach issue is by putting severe restrictions on who can park where, and when. You can’t, not there, never. Otherwise, enjoy the beach.
It’s a different story in California, where cars are allowed to park along Highway 1, and whose drivers can then find their way to the nearest accessible beach, provided some entitled terrorist of the view hasn’t put up an illegal “No Trespassing” sign.
Yes, I’ve got a real problem with people who believe that when they buy that beachside house, they also buy the view that comes along with it. To that end, last year the state took some measures in defense of the Coastal Act’s mandate and gave its OK to the Coastal Commission to start throwing fines at people who illegally block access to public beaches with sneaky signage and the like.
Anyway, it was twilight deep in the super-luxe Hamptons and I couldn’t find a place on the beach to camp out, so I trudged a little further to a point where the houses thinned out and there was a lot of what looked like open space in the dunes.
It looked promising, and it was. I found the perfect outlaw place to camp, hidden from view: In a sandy dip in the dunes, out of eyeshot. Not safe enough to pitch the tent, but by now I was used to roughing it under the stars.
Yeah, well. I woke up on a sultry late-August morning to a Golden Labrador bounding and barking around the outlaw campsite. I popped up out of the sleeping bag and looked around and saw a Latino man pushing a lawn mower nearby. He looked at me, startled, and then quickly looked the other way.
I then realized that I was camped out in a sand-trap on a golf course at the Maidstone Club, whose oceanfront golf course, like Pebble Beach in Malibu, is one of the most exclusive in the world.
They’ll shoot me if they find me here, is what I thought. I scooped my gear into the pack and headed for the beach and kept on with the journey after some cowboy coffee and oranges on a rock jetty. That night I reached Montauk, known affectionately-ironically by its locals as The End.
My adopted hometown of Bolinas has an interesting corollary in Montauk. Both towns are surrounded by public land, and the development has been limited to a kind of core central area. But the story of Montauk, and who trespassed there and drove out the town’s historic middle-class citizenry, is really a cautionary tale as the California economy lusts after a bluff-side luxe housing construction boom.
I lived in Montauk off and on for a bunch of years, fishing and living the good life, and I was out there one early spring and trying to, you know, scrape out a month or two of odd jobs before the fishing season commenced.
I had rented an off-season oceanfront hotel room that was pretty cheap, but the cash was running out fast and my deckhand job wouldn’t kick in for a month or so, so one day I decided to head out to a remote former fish camp for an adventure. I packed a simple kit: A gallon of water, some herb, a bag of peanuts. I had this vague notion of camping out between the boulders or up in the woods, which out there are called Hither Hills. It’s all very California-like, but of the less rugged and more low-slung variety: The bluffs are less tall, the water is warmer.
I spent the day building a shack out of washed-up lobster traps pushed ashore in the winter, and filled it in with other beach-a-brac; bits of fiberglass bulkhead, driftwood, whatever was available. I called the shack the Harry Crews shack because I had a copy of the novelist’s Feast of Snakes in my backpack.
After awhile the sun went down and I realized that this shack was not going to keep me warm. Fires are a big no-no out here, but the hell with that. I burned lots and lots of dry wood, trying to stay warm through the night, woke up and headed right back to the hotel.
It had to be at least a year later and I was working on a head boat for the summer and back in my usual summer rental. A friend came to visit and I said, “Hey, let’s go see what’s happening with the Harry Crews shack.”
We got there and it was lost to the tides and storms, but the book I had left—I found a weathered section of it back in the dune grass. It was the only reminder that a shack had been there. And up the bluff behind where the shack had been, the concrete foundation of a long-ago abandoned fisherman’s shack hung off the edge.
Old fisherman shacks, that’s my kind of living. Montauk and Bolinas are both fishing-and-surfing wilderness towns—but one very big difference is that in Montauk, nearly every available inch of developable land now has a house on it. Montauk used to be the kind of place where even the developed areas had all sorts of natural inter-zones; you could hike through the woods from the beach to the bar, until the woods were bulldozed by developers to make way for the Hamptons money.
In Bolinas there’s a road called Ocean Parkway that has slipped into the ocean in various sections due to the erosion, so the road is chopped like a Don’t Tread On Me snake as it wends around the Big Mesa.
There’s a house that I found to be fascinating, alluring, and if I had any money in the bank, I would have bought it. And yes, it’s an old fisherman’s shack at the end of a section of the Ocean Parkway that is slipping back into the Pacific, but before I could save my pennies (about 10 million of them), the house was sold to some young bearded sort of fellow.
I have to account for my raging class resentment here, but the person who bought the house almost immediately cleared out all of the underbrush, stuck a trampoline on the property and, right at the corner of it that was falling into the ocean, built a little viewing-hangout platform with a canvas roof.
Pretty cool, except that the new owner also hung a couple “Private Property: No Trespassing” signs along the fence and on the viewing platform. From my perspective, that’s a hate crime. The signs were torn down and thrown over the cliff. I recounted the story to one of the High Holy Hippies of Bolinas, who made a sign for
In Bolinas, these kinds of signs have popped up. Staff photo.
me that read, “No No Trespassing Signs (Goes Without Saying),” and which the Coastal Commission should enshrine as its new motto.
Bolinas being a small town with a super-militant attitude about obnoxious signage, the owner has stopped replacing or repairing those “No Trespassing” signs—and I’ve yet to see a person ascend that platform. Except me. That’s a killer view, dude!
ARIES (March 21-April 19): “Old paint on a canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent,” said playwright Lillian Hellman. “When that happens, in some pictures, it is possible to see the original lines: A tree will show through a woman’s dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea.” Why does this happen? Because the painter changed his or her mind. Early images were replaced, painted over. I suspect that a metaphorical version of this is underway in your life. Certain choices you made in the past got supplanted by choices you made later. They disappeared from view. But now those older possibilities are re-emerging for your consideration. I’m not saying what you should do about them. I simply want to alert you to their ghostly presence so they don’t cause confusion.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Let’s talk about your mouth. Since your words flow out of it, you use it to create and shape a lot of your experiences. Your mouth is also the place where food and drink enter your body, as well as some of the air you breathe. So it’s crucial to fueling every move you make. You experience the beloved sense of taste in your mouth. You use your mouth for kissing and other amorous activities. With its help, you sing, moan, shout and laugh. It’s quite expressive, too. As you move its many muscles, you send out an array of emotional signals. I’ve provided this summary in the hope of inspiring you to celebrate your mouth, Taurus. It’s prime time to enhance your appreciation of its blessings!
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Coloring books for adults are best-sellers. Tightly-wound folks relieve their stress by using crayons and markers to brighten up black-and-white drawings of butterflies, flowers, mandalas and pretty fishes. I highly recommend that you avoid this type of recreation in the next three weeks, as it would send the wrong message to your subconscious mind. You should expend as little energy as possible working within frameworks that others have made. You need to focus on designing and constructing your own frameworks.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): The Old Testament book of Leviticus presents a long list of forbidden activities, and declares that anyone who commits them should be punished. You’re not supposed to get tattoos, have messy hair, consult oracles, work on Sunday, wear clothes that blend wool and linen, plant different seeds in the same field, or eat snails, prawns, pigs and crabs. (It’s OK to buy slaves, though.) We laugh at how absurd it would be for us to obey these outdated rules and prohibitions, and yet many of us retain a superstitious loyalty toward guidelines and beliefs that are almost equally obsolete. Here’s the good news, Cancerian: Now is an excellent time to dismantle or purge your own fossilized formulas.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): “I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well,” said the philosopher and naturalist Henry David Thoreau. In accordance with your astrological constitution, Leo, I authorize you to use this declaration as your own almost any time you feel like it. But I do suggest that you make an exception to the rule during the next four weeks. In my opinion, it will be time to focus on increasing your understanding of the people you care about—even if that effort takes time and energy away from your quest for ultimate self-knowledge. Don’t worry: You can return to emphasizing Thoreau’s perspective by the equinox.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): You are entering the inquisitive phase of your astrological cycle. One of the best ways to thrive during the coming weeks will be to ask more questions than you have asked since you were 5 years old. Curiosity and good listening skills will be superpowers that you should strive to activate. For now, what matters most is not what you already know but rather what you need to find out. It’s a favorable time to gather information about riddles and mysteries that have perplexed you for a long time. Be super-receptive and extra wide-eyed!
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Poet Barbara Hamby says the Russian word ostyt can be used to describe “a cup of tea that is too hot, but after you walk to the next room, and return, it is too cool.” A little birdie told me that this may be an apt metaphor for a current situation in your life. I completely understand if you wish the tea had lost less of its original warmth, and was exactly the temperature you like, neither burning nor tepid. But that won’t happen unless you try to reheat it, which would change the taste. So what should you do? One way or the other, a compromise will be necessary. Do you want the lukewarm tea or the hot tea with a different flavor?
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Russian writer Ivan Turgenev was a Scorpio. Midway through his first novel Rudin, his main character Dmitrii Nikolaevich Rudin alludes to a problem that affects many Scorpios. “Do you see that apple tree?” Rudin asks a woman companion. “It is broken by the weight and abundance of its own fruit.” Ouch! I want very much for you Scorpios to be spared a fate like that in the coming weeks. That’s why I propose that you scheme about how you will express the immense creativity that will be welling up in you. Don’t let your lush and succulent output go to waste.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Asking you Sagittarians to be patient may be akin to ordering a bonfire to burn more politely. But it’s my duty to inform you of the cosmic tendencies, so I will request your forbearance for now. How about some nuances to make it more palatable? Here’s a quote from author David G. Allen: “Patience is the calm acceptance that things can happen in a different order than the one you have in mind.” Novelist Gustave Flaubert: “Talent is a long patience.” French playwright Moliere: “Trees that are slow to grow bear the best fruit.” Writer Anne Lamott: “Hope is a revolutionary patience.” I’ve saved the best for last, from Russian novelist Irène Némirovsky: “Waiting is erotic.”
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): “If you ask for help it comes. But not in any way you’d ever know.” Poet Gary Snyder said that, and now I’m passing it on to you, Capricorn. The coming weeks will be an excellent time for you to think deeply about the precise kinds of help you would most benefit from—even as you loosen up your expectations about how your requests for aid might be fulfilled. Be aggressive in seeking assistance, but ready and willing to be surprised as it arrives.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): For a limited time only, 153 is your lucky number. Mauve and olive are your colors of destiny, the platypus is your power animal and torn burlap mended with silk thread is your magic texture. I realize that all of this may sound odd, but it’s the straight-up truth. The nature of the cosmic rhythms are rather erratic right now. To be in maximum alignment with the irregular opportunities that are headed your way, you should probably make yourself magnificently mysterious, even to yourself. To quote an old teacher, this might be a good time to be “so unpredictable that not even you yourself knows what’s going to happen.”
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): In the long-running TV show M*A*S*H*, the character known as Sidney Freedman was a psychiatrist who did his best to nurture the mental health of the soldiers in his care. He sometimes departed from conventional therapeutic approaches. In the series finale, he delivered the following speech, which I believe is highly pertinent to your current quest for good mental hygiene: “I told you people something a long time ago, and it’s just as pertinent today as it was then. Ladies and gentlemen, take my advice, pull down your pants and slide on the ice.”
Homework: What good thing would you have to give up in order to get a great thing? Testify at Freewillastrology.com. Click on “Email Rob.”
Hero: With thousands of Marinites joining forces with the Salmon Protection And Watershed Network (SPAWN) to save the critically endangered coho salmon in Lagunitas Creek, it’s time for our county supervisors to pass a common-sense, science-based streamside conservation ordinance. The wild coho salmon in Lagunitas Creek are at the southernmost end of their run, and scientists believe that we must preserve this genetic stock for the welfare of the entire species. Wow! The world is relying on Marin to do the right thing. For more info, go to seaturtles.org and click on the salmon link. Then, be a hero and call your supervisor at 415/473-7331 to demand an ordinance requiring a 35-foot vegetative buffer around the West Marin creek to save the wild coho salmon.
Zero: A bank chain in our neighborhoods needs to make a change, specifically about their policy not to make change. Out of quarters for the parking meter? That Chase bank on the corner won’t take your dollar bill, unless you have an account there. We heard about a Mill Valley resident who withdrew money from the outside ATM at the branch on East Blithedale, paid the out-of-network charge and then went into the bank to request two $10 bills for the $20 bill that their machine just spit out. They refused, claiming he wasn’t a customer. (Aren’t you a customer if you just paid them a fee?) We asked a teller there and she said they don’t make exceptions, which earns them Zero interest from us.
Got a Hero or a Zero? Please send submissions to ni***************@ya***.com.
Q: My girlfriend got laid off four months ago, along with many of her co-workers. She is not making a serious attempt to find a job and is just living off unemployment benefits. She stays up until morning watching TV and sleeps until the late afternoon. I figured that she may be depressed, so I encouraged her to go to counseling and to volunteer or take a course so she would feel productive, but she refused. She has a great work ethic when she’s employed, so I’m very puzzled by this. Worse yet, I’m quickly losing respect for her.—Disturbed
A: Unfortunately, drooling while napping is not considered a form of multitasking.
It’s understandable that you’re losing respect for your girlfriend, given her newfound leadership in the Occupy the Couch movement. Now, maybe she is just lazy, or maybe, like dieters who decide to eat like walruses over the holidays, she’s decided to take some lazy time. However, because you describe her as pretty industrious when she’s working, it’s possible that her descent into human slipcoverhood comes out of how frustratingly scarce jobs are in certain professions. When you’re hardworking and good at your job, the answer to, “Where do you see yourself a year from now?” isn’t supposed to be, “On a corner with a cardboard sign, begging for change.”
The sense that productivity has become unproductive can trigger an emotional response called “low mood,” marked by fatigue, deep pessimism, feelings of worthlessness, changes in appetite and sleep and a slowing of motivation (symptoms also seen in depression). Psychiatrist and evolutionary psychologist Randolph Nesse believes that low mood evolved to stop us from wasting our energy by persisting in fruitless endeavors, like waiting around for our bison dinner to grab a drink at a watering hole that’s run dry. (Pointless persistence was especially likely to be fatal a million or so years before the creation of 7-Elevens and fast-food drive-thrus.)
To understand why our psychology would be set up like this—to stick its foot out and trip us—it helps to recognize that our emotions are basically traffic directors for our behavior, designed to maximize our survival and reproductive success, not our happiness. Accordingly, Nesse explains that the “disengagement” from motivation that accompanies low mood serves a number of purposes: To immediately prevent further losses, to make us rethink what we’re doing and to signal to others that we need care. (Ticket to Hugsville, please.)
The psychiatric bible of mental disorders, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, doesn’t bother to differentiate between the “adaptive” low mood that Nesse is talking about and depression caused by malfunctioning brain chemistry. The manual’s diagnosis of depression just involves taking count: Five or more almost daily symptoms (fatigue, pessimism, etc.) lasting for more than two weeks? Congratulations! You’re depressed. But what’s important to note from Nesse’s work is that depression isn’t necessarily a sign of brain dysfunction. And there’s a lot of hope in this, because if your symptoms have an environmental reason, maybe you can see your way to an environmental remedy.
If your girlfriend is experiencing low mood, the last thing that she needs is the sense that her job loss will soon have the loss of her boo to keep it company. Let her know that you love her and are there for her, and then tell her about Nesse’s thinking on low mood, which might help her scavenge enough hope to start thinking outside the, uh, bed.
Physical action is another emotion-changer—even if you have to force it. For example, research by psychologist James Laird finds that busting out smiles actually makes people happier. Research by biopsychologist Timothy Puetz finds that acting energized—like by regularly doing 20 moderately paced minutes on an exercise bike—actually energizes, with the ensuing raised heart rate and various surging biochemicals basically standing in for force-feeding a 5-hour ENERGY drink to that ugly low mood.
Cognitive-behavioral therapy, which uses reason to help people dig out of their emotional problems, could also be helpful. However, because your girlfriend’s idea of productivity now seems to involve simply sitting in the dark rather than lying in the dark, you might take on the therapeutic preliminaries: Find the therapist; make the appointment; and be there to drive her at the appointed time. However, you should also be prepared for her to refuse to get in the car when that time comes. That said, your being something of a pushy jerk for the woman you love will probably mean a lot. It just might be the push she needs to start living through FOMO—Fear Of Missing Out—instead of fear of missing out on an afternoon of making paisley patterns on her face with the couch.
This week in the Pacific Sun, our cover story, ‘Forging Ahead,’ tells of the success of four artists opening the first-ever tattoo shop in Fairfax. On top of that, our Food & Drink column explores a ‘climate menu,‘ we talk to ‘The Danish Girl’ director Tom Hooper about his inspiration for the film, Charles Brousse reviews two plays and Charlie Swanson talks skifflin’. All that and more on stands and online today!
ARIES (March 21-April 19): “Love is a fire,” declared Aries actress Joan Crawford. “But whether it’s going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell.” I disagree with her conclusion. There are practical steps you can take to ensure that love’s fire warms but doesn’t burn. Start with these strategies: Suffuse your libido with compassion. Imbue your romantic fervor with empathy. Instill your animal passions and instinctual longings with affectionate tenderness. If you catch your sexual urges driving you toward narcissists who are no damn good for you, firmly redirect those sexual urges toward emotionally intelligent, self-responsible beauties.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Fifteenth-century writer Thomas à Kempis thought that real love can arouse enormous fortitude in the person who loves. “Love feels no burden … ,” he wrote. “[It] attempts what is above its strength, pleads no excuse of impossibility; for it thinks all things lawful for itself, and all things possible.” As you might imagine, the “real love” he was referring to is not the kind that’s motivated by egotism, power drives, blind lust or insecurity. I think you know what I mean, Taurus, because in the past few months you have had unprecedented access to the primal glory that Thomas referred to. And in the coming months you will have even more. What do you plan to do with all that mojo?
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Gemini novelist Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) was fascinated in “life with the lid on and what happens when the lid comes off.” She knew both states from her own experience. “When you love someone,” she mused about the times the lid had come off, “all your saved-up wishes start coming out.” In accordance with the astrological omens, I propose that you engage in the following three-part exercise. First, identify a part of your life that has the lid tightly clamped over it. Second, visualize the suppressed feelings and saved-up wishes that might pour forth if you took the lid off. Third, do what it takes to love someone so well that you’ll knock the lid off.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): “No one has ever loved anyone the way everyone wants to be loved,” wrote author Mignon McLaughlin. I think that may be true. The gap between what we yearn for and what we actually get is never fully closed. Nevertheless, I suggest that you strive to refute McLaughlin’s curse in the coming days. Why? Because you now have an enhanced capacity to love the people you care about in ways they want to be loved. So be experimental with your tenderness. Take the risk of going beyond what you’ve been willing or able to give before. Trust your fertile imagination to guide your ingenious empathy.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Here’s the counsel of French writer Anatole France: “You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; in just the same way, you learn to love by loving.” What he says is always true, but it’s especially apropos for you Leos in the coming weeks. You now have a special talent for learning more about love by loving deeply, excitedly and imaginatively. To add further nuance and inspiration, meditate on this advice from author Aldous Huxley: “There isn’t any formula or method. You learn to love by loving—by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.”
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): “I do not trust people who don’t love themselves and yet tell me, ‘I love you,’” said author Maya Angelou. She concludes: “There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.” With this in mind, I invite you to take inventory of the allies and relatives whose relationships are most important to you. How well do they love themselves? Is there anything you could do to help them upgrade their love for themselves? If their self-love is lacking, what might you do to protect yourself from that problem?
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): “Only love interests me,” declared painter Marc Chagall, “and I am only in contact with things that revolve around love.” That seems like an impossibly high standard. Our daily adventures bring us into proximity with loveless messes all the time. It’s hard to focus on love to the exclusion of all other concerns. But it’s a worthy goal to strive toward Chagall’s ideal for short bursts of time. And the coming weeks happen to be a favorable phase for you to do just that. Your success may be partial, but dramatic nonetheless.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): “A coward is incapable of exhibiting love,” said Mahatma Gandhi. “It is the prerogative of the brave.” That’s my challenge to you, Scorpio. In accordance with the astrological currents, I urge you to stoke your uninhibited audacity so you can press onward toward the frontiers of intimacy. It’s not enough to be wilder, and it’s not enough to be freer. To fulfill love’s potential in the next chapter of your story, you’ve got to be wilder, freer and bolder.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): “It is not lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages,” said Friedrich Nietzsche. He believed that if you want to join your fortunes with another’s, you should ask yourself whether you will enjoy your conversations with this person for the next 30 years—because that’s what you’ll be doing much of the time you’re together. How do you measure up to this gold standard, Sagittarius? What role does friendship play in your romantic adventures? If there’s anything lacking, now is an excellent time to seek improvements. Start with yourself, of course. How could you infuse more camaraderie into the way you express love? What might you do to upgrade your skills as a conversationalist?
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): “Love isn’t something you find,” says singer Loretta Lynn. “Love is something that finds you.” Singer Kylie Minogue concurs: “You need a lot of luck to find people with whom you want to spend your life … love is like a lottery.” I think these perspectives are at best misleading, and at worst debilitating. They imply that we have no power to shape our relationship with love. My view is different. I say there’s a lot we can do to attract intimate allies who teach us, stimulate us and fulfill us. Like what? 1. We clarify what qualities we want in a partner, and we make sure that those qualities are also healthy for us. 2. We get free of unconscious conditioning that’s at odds with our conscious values. 3. We work to transform ourselves into lovable collaborators who communicate well. Anything else? What can you do to make sure that love isn’t a lottery?
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): “We all have the potential to fall in love a thousand times in our lifetime,” writes Chuck Klosterman. “It’s easy. But there are certain people you love who do something else; they define how you classify what love is supposed to feel like … you’ll meet maybe four or five of these people over the span of 80 years.” He concludes, “A love like this sets the template for what you will always love about other people.” I suspect that you have either recently met or will soon meet such a person, Aquarius. Or else you are on the verge of going deeper than ever before with an ally who you have known for a while. That’s why I think that what happens in the next six months will put an enduring stamp on your relationship with intimacy.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Sixteenth-century Italian poet Torquato Tasso described one of love’s best blessings. He said that your lover can reunite you with “a piece of your soul that you never knew was missing.” You Pisceans are in a phase when this act of grace is more possible than usual. The revelatory boon may emerge because of the chemistry stirred up by a sparkly new affiliation. Or it may arise thanks to a familiar relationship that is entering unfamiliar territory.
Homework: Want some inspiration as you compose your romantic invitations? Go here: http://bit.ly/LoveAd.
It’s not a bad movie, Hail, Caesar!, because it’s not even really a movie; still, the exuberance of the actors makes up for its sprawl.
There really was an Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) at MGM. He was a former bouncer whose duties included covering up the scandalous behavior of movie stars in the 1940s and 1950s. The Coens present this fictional Mannix of circa 1951 as a tormented Catholic, requiring daily confessions to a priest.
At Capitol Pictures, Mannix has other people’s sins to worry about. The Esther Williams-like DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson) is unmarried, pregnant and starting to have trouble fitting into her rubber mermaid costume. Cowboy hero Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich) is being groomed into roles as a debonair playboy. Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), a Stephen Boyd-style star of epics, is currently wrapping up Hail, Caesar!, which strongly resembles The Robe. Meanwhile, the Van Johnson-ish Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum) is shooting the kind of all-male musical that inspired Bowie’s lines in “Life On Mars:” “She could spit in the eyes of fools/as they ask her to focus on/Sailors, fighting in the dance hall … ”
When it ends, one wonders if it’s more than just a chance for soundtrack artist Carter Burwell and cinematographer Roger Deakins to revive the strangeness and charm of the Hollywood studio style. They’re experts at it, as seen in Johansson’s number, a pretty revival of the Busby Berkeley synchronized-swimming aquacade, staged to the barcarole from The Tales of Hoffman.
Two relative newcomers brighten this film. One is Ehrenreich, who has the kind of hair that gossip columnists used to describe as “rebellions curls;” he has warmth and earthiness, and his character turns out to be the real thing in this factory full of fakes. Hail Caesar! also could have used more of Veronica Osorio’s sweetness as a Carmen Miranda type who is assigned Hobey as an escort.
It’s easy to be charmed by the gang of actors. It’s less compelling to wonder whether Mannix should continue to serve God or Mammon. At the end, you’re unsure how much this distant echo of Sullivan’s Travels is based on anything real. Even at their level of age and success, do the Coens fret much about selling out?
Skiffle is defined musically as a blend of jazz, blues and roots music dating back to the early 20th century that’s often homemade and improvised. But, for musician and bandleader Farmer Dave Scher, it’s a way of life.
“I think the idea of skiffle and the function it serves in the human story appears again and again in all kinds of cultures,” says Scher by phone from his home in Los Angeles. “There’s something cobbled together, something unpredictable, there’s a certain disregard for propriety that ensures beauty, fun, truth, authenticity and some good sounds.”
With that mindset, Scher, a keyboardist whose previous bands include alt-country outfit Beachwood Sparks, formed the Skiffle Players with folk songwriter Cass McCombs, guitarist Neal Casal (Chris Robinson Brotherhood), bassist Dan Horne and Beachwood Sparks drummer Aaron Sperske. The ensemble’s debut album, Skifflin’, comes out on Friday, February 12, and the group performs live on Feb. 15 at Sweetwater Music Hall in Mill Valley.
“The idea is to work with what you have. It’s not about polish and procedure, it’s scrappy,” Scher says. “It’s a reflection of the human spirit, and the human spirit cannot be bought and sold.”
The players were originally assembled in Big Sur as a backing band for McCombs, who’s been a close friend of Scher since 2004.
“The vocabulary was good, the camaraderie was good,” says Scher of that initial performance. “We decided to pop into the studio and we got about two albums worth of stuff in three days. It was like an old car or something—it started right up.”
Scher sees that ease with which the band was created as the essence of skiffle. Without contrivance, the accomplished musicians each let forth a flow of roots-inspired music that ranges from moody to whimsical. “The guys I’m playing with have a lot of knowledge and really go back with songs and stories from the past,” Scher says. “I’ve learned a lot from them over time.”
Many songs on Skifflin’ prominently feature a repetitive hook, with McCombs singing sonorously over a weeping lap pedal steel guitar solo; others nearly verge on honky tonk, with barroom pianos and blazing harmonicas. Collected together, Skifflin’ is a satisfying road trip through the Americana landscape.
“Skiffle is an open invitation, without limitations,” Scher says. “We cover as much ground as we can because that’s what makes it so fun, sort of like you’re jumping from one box car to the next.”
The Skiffle Players show their stuff on Monday, Feb. 15, at Sweetwater Music Hall, 19 Corte Madera Ave, Mill Valley; 8pm; $22-$25; 415/485-9555.
By David Templeton
“Princes come, princes go,” sings Omar Khayyam at the start of the long-lost musical Kismet, now playing at Spreckels Performing Arts Center. The same sentiment can be said of Broadway shows like this one. A huge hit in 1953, the Arabian-themed romance is largely unknown today.
In Spreckels Theatre Company’s nostalgia-driven new production—full of vibrant costumes, outstanding singing...
By Tanya Henry
When Alex and Lisa Stricker took over the Flatiron in 2013, the longtime watering hole received a major facelift. The San Rafael institution was transformed into a cleaner, brighter sports bar that maintained its convivial, inviting vibe but with better food and less grunginess. When the couple announced that they had bought the nearby Broken Drum on...
By Tom Gogola
There’s a sturdy and well-appointed beach shack along the California coast. The precise details of its location, should they be publicized, would likely mean the end of the shack at the hands of The Man, so let’s just say that it is somewhere between Santa Cruz and Jenner—or, even better, somewhere between San Diego and the Oregon...
By Rob Brezsny
ARIES (March 21-April 19): “Old paint on a canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent,” said playwright Lillian Hellman. “When that happens, in some pictures, it is possible to see the original lines: A tree will show through a woman’s dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open...
By Nikki Silverstein
Hero: With thousands of Marinites joining forces with the Salmon Protection And Watershed Network (SPAWN) to save the critically endangered coho salmon in Lagunitas Creek, it’s time for our county supervisors to pass a common-sense, science-based streamside conservation ordinance. The wild coho salmon in Lagunitas Creek are at the southernmost end of their run, and scientists believe...
By Amy Alkon
Q: My girlfriend got laid off four months ago, along with many of her co-workers. She is not making a serious attempt to find a job and is just living off unemployment benefits. She stays up until morning watching TV and sleeps until the late afternoon. I figured that she may be depressed, so I encouraged her...
This week in the Pacific Sun, our cover story, 'Forging Ahead,' tells of the success of four artists opening the first-ever tattoo shop in Fairfax. On top of that, our Food & Drink column explores a 'climate menu,' we talk to 'The Danish Girl' director Tom Hooper about his inspiration for the film, Charles Brousse reviews two plays and...
By Rob Brezsny
ARIES (March 21-April 19): “Love is a fire,” declared Aries actress Joan Crawford. “But whether it’s going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell.” I disagree with her conclusion. There are practical steps you can take to ensure that love’s fire warms but doesn’t burn. Start with these strategies: Suffuse your...
By Richard von Busack
It’s not a bad movie, Hail, Caesar!, because it’s not even really a movie; still, the exuberance of the actors makes up for its sprawl.
There really was an Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) at MGM. He was a former bouncer whose duties included covering up the scandalous behavior of movie stars in the 1940s and 1950s. The...
By Charlie Swanson
Skiffle is defined musically as a blend of jazz, blues and roots music dating back to the early 20th century that’s often homemade and improvised. But, for musician and bandleader Farmer Dave Scher, it’s a way of life.
“I think the idea of skiffle and the function it serves in the human story appears again and again in...
