Deeds & Words

Here are Sonoma County’s local Jefferson Awardees this year. The Jefferson Awards are given to local, regional and national volunteers — sort of a Nobel prize for volunteers. Sorry the pictures are so bad. I had to hold the camera over the heads of the people in front of me, and the big head you see in the lower left corner on a couple belong to the designated Press Democrat reporter who was covering the Board of Supervisors that day. Through no manuevering of her own, Supervisor Valerie Brown ended up in almost every picture, due to where her chair is and, to quote Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, because “The answer lies in trigonometry.”

Oscar Chavez, Executive Director of Community Action Partnership, Sonoma. Oscar is also on the Workforce Investment Board, Health Action and the Innovation Council. He has spent his whole career helping people find ways out of poverty.

Pedro Toledo accepted the award for Healthy Kids Sonoma, a subset of the Sonoma County Children’s Health Initiative. Healthy Kids provides health coverage, access and case management for 18,000 children, who before Healthy Kids did not have access to well-child checkups or health care in general. Pedro’s group is getting ready to launch an awareness campaign called iCare for Kids.

Diane Curtin, the Executive Director, accepted the Jefferson Award for Chops, the Teen Center. Chops was funded by Tom DeMeo, a local lawyer who left a fund for a teen center. The Chops Center has recreational and educational space, a kitchen, art studio and recording studio. The kids at Chops have created handcars for the Handcar Regatta for the last two years.

Cathryn Couch accepted for Ceres Community Project. Ceres is near and dear to my heart for a few reasons. One is, Cathryn loves kale. Another is that my friend Kathleen used the program when she was recovering from cancer. Ceres provides meals for people recovering from cancer, catastrophic illness or surgery. The food is mostly local, mostly if not totally organic, and Ceres uses teens to work in their kitchen and cook the meals. The connections are amazing. This is a young program by local standards –Ceres just had its fifth birthday last week, and just moved into new space a mile from my house. I love this program.

Rick Dean was nominated for Face2Face, the Sonoma AIDS Network. Rick accepted on behalf of his staff, his board, his volunteers and his clients. Rick and I are on the Commission on AIDS together. It’s an honor to serve with someone like him, who has worked to end the epidemic for more than 20 years. Supervisor Mike McGuire invited Rick’s very pround mother up to be in the picture with him.

My review of The Outcast Blade, by Jon Courtenay Grimwood, and the interview with him, is posted at fantasyliterature. You can find it by clicking on the author link, going to G for Grimwood, etc, or Fanlit Features, author interviews.

The Chalk Girl is Carol O’Connell’s latest Mallory mystery. Mallory is back on the job at NYPD, with no explanation for her three-month absence (except we know, because we read Find Me). If any further proof were needed that the Mallory books are not “gritty realism,” that they occupy some surreal universe that is not our own, it would be this – that an NYPD detective can disappear from the job for three months, return without a word, and be instantly reinstated.

Well, perhaps not instantly. There is a little matter of the unfavorable psych evaluation that is keeping her on desk duty. Mallory gives that directive exactly the attention it deserves, and is planning a special revenge for the shrink who penned the eval.

Kathy Mallory is a fabulous monster. I know with every book in the series that Mallory could not exist in a real police department anywhere, but I don’t care. In The Chalk Girl, Mallory and her partner Riker take on old money and top brass, including the acting Chief of Police and the Chief of Detectives. At risk are two children. One is Coco, a red-ringleted waif who is found wandering in Central Park, who looks like a fairy figurine, and who knows all there is to know about rats. The other is Ernest, who speaks to us from his journal in every chapter heading; Ernest, who is terrified and brave.

The book opens with one of O’Connell’s standard macabre, hilarious scenes, a tsunami of rats. These aren’t regular rats, either. They are stoned rats, stoned on the gas an incompetent pest control guy tried to kill them with. Rats on meth, basically, overrun Central Park. As the rats begin to clear out, people find Coco, with her red curls and the blood spattered on the shoulders of her sweater. Coco says she came to the park with her Uncle Red, who turned into a tree, and the tree is bleeding.

Charles Butler, Mallory’s wealthy, brilliant psychologist friend, diagnoses Coco as having Williams Syndrome. At eight years old, she has trouble buttoning her blouse and cannot tie shoelaces, but she can play piano sonatas and identify any brand of vacuum cleaner just by listening to the motor. In a series noted for a certain kind of excess, I think O’Connell went over the top with the Williams Syndrome, glamorizing the condition for purposes of the plot, and making Coco a magical child instead of a real one. Of course, Mallory is the ultimate magical being, so I suppose Coco is just in keeping with the theme.

The fate of Coco’s uncle –who isn’t an uncle at all – is wrapped up with the death of another child fifteen years earlier. The case is rife with madness and lies, extortion and bribery, and at its heart are three vicious, privileged children and the one who tried to bring them to justice.

I also read the Harry Bosch books, by Michael Connelly. Bosch often uncovers the truth and confronts the powerful people at the top. He never quite manages to take them down. Often one of the upper echelon dwellers is sacrificed or scape-goated, but Bosch often walks away feeling like a dupe or a tool of those in power. The message is, “You can’t bring down the system.” Mallory is the anti-Bosch. I imagine career cops reading these books at home, snickering secretly as Mallory does the things they wish they could do. That we all wish we could do.

One of Mallory’s nicknames in the squad is Mallory the Machine. She is perfectly beautiful, perfectly dressed, perfectly manicured and perfectly cool. Mallory doesn’t think she is about justice, or even vengeance. Mallory thinks she is about winning. Mallory’s function, in fiction, is bigger than that, though. It’s that of a goddess. She’s Nemesis.

The Healdsburg Museum occupies the building that used to hold the town library. I remember going there when I was a kid. The pillars by the door made me think I was entering a temple. I can’t remember any particular book I got from there but I remember the checkout desk near the door and the children’s section, and the smell of my mom’s face powder and holding her hand as we went through the door.

The building sits at 221 Matheson, on the corner of Fitch and Matheson — about two blocks east of the square. It is open Wednesday through Sunday, from 11 am. When I went in, there was an eager and friendly volunteer, probably a retired guy, who greeted me. The museum had a textile exhibit on one side, and a standing exhibit that included Pomo baskets, books and photos from  various schools in the area, and a diarama titled “From hops, to prunes to grapes.”

Folk Arts:

The current display has three quilts, including a rich velvet crazy quilt. In addition to the really striking spinning wheel, the exhibit includes a loom, several examples of embroidery samplers and a dress with beautifully tatted lace.

More Than Wine:

The town and the area is pretty rich in history, and wine is only one chapter. Harmon Heald founded the town because he opened a sawmill here; lumber was a big crop at first. Hops were big in the early 1900s, up into the 1930s. In the sixties and seventies, this was a big growing area for Sunsweet Prunes.

The next time you decide to hit the tasting rooms on the square, leave some time for the museum.

My comments on Who Fears Death are posted at fanlit.

By the end of the week I plan to send a review and an interview with British writer Jon Courtenay Grimwood to Fanlit. I will link to it here, but obviously the content is theirs first, so I probably won’t share much here until it’s been posted there. Does that even make sense? It did when I started.

I will say this; Grimwood’s second book in his trilogy The Acts of the Assassini is coming out on March 26. It’s called The Outcast Blade and I recommend it. You should read it. Or no, wait — you should read Book One, The Fallen Blade, first. Or, no, wait… you could hit your local used bookstore and get copies of all three of Grimwood’s Arabesk series, read those, then read The Fallen Blade, and then you’d be all set for The Outcast Blade.

Is it obvious I’m a fan? I am, and it’s kind of a fluke, because I walked past his books for quite a while.

The first book of his I looked at was End of the World Blues. I think what got my attention was the glowing nautilus shell on the cover, proving once again that I am just as shallow as I think I am. I reviewed it here. It was my second blog posting and my first review. Re-reading the review, having read much more of Grimwood’s writing between then and now, I see that maybe I didn’t quite get it.

The thing is, when I read the backs of Grimwood’s books, or the blurb at Amazon, they don’t interest me. For example, Amazon pointed me at the Arabesk trilogy for years, but I read the description that included this paragraph…

“With few clues and no money, all Raf has is a surname hinting at noble heritage and an arranged marriage to a woman who hates him. But nothing Ashraf al Mansur learns about himself is as unexpected—or as terrifying—as the brutal murder he’s accused of committing. Now, as a hunted man with the welfare of a precocious young girl in his irresponsible hands, Raf must race after a killer through an unforgiving city as foreign to him as the truth he’ll uncover about himself.”

… and thought “Mmmm, neh. Not for me.”

Not for me? The search for identity? Unjustly accused? Precocious children? Strange cities? C’mon, that paragraph is a literary buffet of my favorite themes. All that’s missing is chocolate! I know that, now.

Grimwood writes characters and books that can’t be easily summed up in one paragraph on the back. I certainly can’t sum them up. In this market-share-and-target-demo-world, this has got to be some kind of a curse, but Grimwood soldiers on.

I can say that if you like Mieville and/or Gibson, you will probably like Grimwood. If you like Felix Gilman, you will probably like Grimwood. If you like Richard K Morgan, you may like Grimwood.  If you like Margaret Atwood, you may like Grimwood.

What I can’t say is, “If you like books with magic, set in Venice, with a vampire main character, you’ll like Grimwood,”  or, “If you like alternate history stories, with a cyberpunk or gene-punk twist, and you like low-life former criminal main characters, you’ll like Grimwood,” because those set you up to have expectations; expectations of pretty magic, noble vampires, cool tech, lots of computer hacking. . . and those expectations may not be met.

You will probably like Grimwood if you find the theme of the search for identity (literal, social, spiritual) intriguing, you can tolerate a lot of brutality and violence, you like reading about places that are foreign to you, and you enjoy a sardonic British delivery.

Brian Fies gave a presentation at the Charles Schulz Museum Saturday. He was upstairs in the education center, a nice-sized classroom with plenty of art supplies, several statements made by Schulz painted on the walls, and a large porthole. Brian set up in the front corner. He had his books and one of my favorite props, the spaceship he made so he could draw it for Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?

When I got there, Brian was talking to a teenager in a red ballcap, who was taking notes. It turned out he was interviewing Brian for an assignment. The boy’s father and I talked for a couple of minutes while I took some pictures. Since Brian’s official photographer was off at a secret  cell meeting of that hotbed of socialism and feminism, the Girl Scouts, I used their camera to take a few shots.They’re a little disappointing. Karen is a far better photographer than I am, but this is what comes of letting her go off on her own.

The boy’s questions were basically, “How do you get this job?” Brian talked a little bit about his personal story. He ran through the options for a young cartoonist now; the internet, writing single comics, or strips, for magazines, creating your own “zine.”

To create a zine,you tell your story, you take it down to Kinko’s and run off two hundred, then you fold them and staple them yourself and hand them out, or sell them. It may not make you a lot of money, but it gets you known in the comic world. Some people sell them at conventions, he said. Raina Telemeier got started by creating zines. Hands down, though, Brian recommends the internet. His award-winnning book Mom’s Cancer started as an internet comic.

I met Brian’s friend Jason Whiton, who came up from Mill Valley. Whiton has written a book about Mort Walker, the creator of the comic Beetle Bailey. The book is called Mort Walker, Conversations. Whiton also has a pretty cool blog @ spyvibe.com  He teaches; film, art and photography. Pretty cool guy! I didn’t think quickly enough to get a picture of him with Brian — but Jason might do a stint as the “cartoonist in residence” at the museum sometime too.

Brian politely pointed out that although the museum calls the program its “cartoonist in residence,” he never actually gets to sleep there. He doesn’t have a nice little cottage with a wise-cracking graduate student to bring him his meals. It’s more like having studio hours. Still a great program, though.

Brian talked about the creation of his own personal font from his own lettering, so that he can automate the speech balloon process. Hand lettering in a comic or graphic novel was fine for hundreds of years, but when the book goes into foreign printing rights and has to be translated into German, Italian or French, it’s less labor intensive if there is an existing font. It also makes editing easier for the writer. Because Brian based the font on his own lettering, it is basically his writing. I had honestly never thought of this before. What did  writers use in the old days?  Correction fluid?

He also had a slide show. Brian is very generous about his work and his process;  so he shows how an idea gets blocked out, and then drawn and finally finished — the whole concept of a story-board right before your eyes.

The city council is trying to rescue a grove of virgin redwoods that grows in the center of town – oh, no, wait, that isn’t right. The city council is trying to rescue a series of vernal pools, home to the rare, magical blue flame salamander —no, sorry, wait, that isn’t it, either. The city council is trying to rescue a derelict car dealership from being remodeled into a pharmacy and a bank. Yeah, that’s it.

Pellini’s Chevrolet was a mainstay of this town for decades, but it closed about two years ago, a victim of the recession and retirements. The parcel sits on the corner of Bodega Avenue (Highway 12) and Petaluma Avenue, which is the northbound one-way artery through town. Main Street (Highway 116) is the southbound one.

Armstrong Development has submitted plans to redevelop the parcel and turn it into a large CVS superstore, with a drive-through pharmacy, and a Chase Bank. The CVS north of town, in the Redwood Village mall, would close. The developer’s original design didn’t pass the town’s design review, but they appealed and won the appeal. Now the city council has pulled the plug on the project again, kicking the design back for a third time. They are saying that they want fewer parking spaces (yes, that’s right – ask a retailer to provide less parking) and that they’ve “approved everything else.” The developer has yet to come back with a decision.

I’m usually not a fan of development, especially when the developers want to chop down trees, pave over streams, or plow up greenbelt. I don’t have too much trouble with developing urban parcels that are already built on, though, and I don’t understand what the city council’s problem is, except that our city council is justly notorious for jerking around developers.

There are a few groups who are vocally opposed to this project. Committee for Small Town Sebastopol, is one, and one of them is Occupy Sebastopol. Reasons range from the practical to the incoherent.  Here are some:

A large retail store will increase traffic congestion.  This is true, and the city should be prepared to deal with it.

A large retail store doesn’t match Sebastopol’s “Main Street Character.” This is Committee for Small Town Sebastopol’s argument, and it just doesn’t hold up very well.  Pellini’s is on the westbound approach into town. On the same stretch of road currently we have the following small-town-type businesses; a liquor store, a tire store, a mate processing plant, an auto parts store, a Goodwill, and a tattoo parlor. This is Main Street character?  Oh, and right now, an empty car dealership, broken windows covered with plywood, already attracting graffiti.

We want something else.  Well, of course we do. Even I do. If I had my choice, I’d love to see a combination performing arts center, gallery, used bookstore, cute little café, preferably with a courtyard or a pocket park, with a fountain where the town’s herd of unicorns could come to drink at dusk. Unfortunately, this particular complex is unlikely to happen (and the unicorns are not the unlikeliest factor in that scenario). Is the city going to offer tax credits and breaks to other syndicates to develop something more like what some of us want? If they are, I have to ask, “With what revenue?”

We hate Chase. This appears to be Occupy Sebastopol’s argument, or one of them at least. I can say with confidence that I’ve spoken to one-third of Occupy Sebastopol, and he doesn’t like Chase Bank because they were one of the architects of the economic meltdown. Chase already has a bank in town though, and all they would be doing is moving their existing one. So, are we proving anything?

They’re part of the 1%. Occupy Sebastopol, again. I don’t know who is part of the 1% —  Chase again, I would imagine.

I have concerns about the project. I drive past that building every day on my way to work, and traffic is already bad. Traffic is a real risk of the project and should be addressed by the city council.  I don’t like the idea of another big empty retail space north of town, attracting graffiti and crime. What will the current CVS space be used for, if they relocate? And I think all these issues could be addressed if we had a city council who knew how to do its job.

The real issue, to me, is that our city council never knows what it wants. They want to create jobs; they want to invite businesses, except when they don’t. They want “Main Street” businesses in downtown, but the local bookstore closed its used book annex because they couldn’t afford the new rent, and storefronts sit empty on the actual Main Street for a year at a time.  Armstrong Developers may decide to walk away from this project. With our little city, there is no guarantee that if they do what’s being asked now, that will be end of it. There’s nothing stopping the city council from demanding the president of Armstrong Developers stand on his head while singing the  theme song from “the Sopranos,” before they approve the project. If they approve it. Ever.

In the meantime, the building sits empty, surrounded by a chain-link fence. Nothing says “Wclcome to Town” like a derelict building.

My review of Mechanique; a Tale of the Circus Tresaulti is now posted at fanlit.

Faith joined the US Navy, the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Services), after Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941. She ended up assigned to Washington DC, where she met my mom. (They both worked in a code-breaking unit.) She served for two years. This means that she gets a flag at her funeral, and the leader of the color guard from the American Legion gave her folded flag to Colleen, her oldest child.

Faith and my dad were pretty active in the Legion on Orcas Island, and she continued her involvement after he died. The color guard did a gun salute in the courtyard, close enough to the windows that their expended brass bounced off them. Boom! (Tink!) Boom! (Tink!)  Boom! (Tink!)

When the formal part of the service was over, four of the grandkids ran outside to scrounge the shells.

Marlene, Faith’s daughter-in-law, brought nearly seventy photos, from Faith as a three-year-old with her parents, up to a great photo of her, dancing with Marlene and cousin Elise on New Year’s Eve, 2011.  There were a handful of pictures from the Alaska homestead, where Faith and her husband George lived for a few years.  Most of the pictures include Faith and one or several of her kids, and many with grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

John Liger knew Faith from the Senior Center. He sang “Oh, Danny Boy,” one of her favorites, accompanied by Ron. At the end of the service he sang another song, “We’ll Meet Again.” Ron had his sheet music on an iPad, which he put up on the music stand.

While she was on the island, Faith volunteered at the library. She went to senior lunch at the senior center, helped at events at the Legion, and went with my dad to the Ham Radio club field days.

Several people who talked about Faith spoke of the pioneer spirit. Elise talked about Faith’s tendency to say, “Oh, yes!” to everything. Faith loved to travel. She loved to see new things. She loved her family, and playing Scrabble. She was quietly patriotic, quietly funny, deeply private, and she did not judge.