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June 25, 2015 | vol. 27, issue 10

To your health The recession. It sucked. And it really sucked for the poorest of the poor, like undocumented immigrants. Poor folks don’t usually rub elbows with powerful interests, people who can have their backs at places like City Hall or the Capitol. In fact, they often get screwed over by the powers that be. And they seldom have journalists sharing these tales of injustice with the public, either. So, when times get tough, the poor are the easiest of easy targets. Little surprise, this is what happened in Sacramento County in 2009, when supervisors voted to cut health care for undocumented immigrants. The rub is that the county only saved about $3 million a year by making this move. And, as we now know, the savings were voided by all the associated costs that stem from citizens not having health coverage. Yet denying immigrants care continued. As of last year, Sacramento was the largest metropolitan area in California to deny health services to undocumenteds (see “No health care for all,” by Sasha Abramsky; SN&R Feature Story; June 19, 2014; at http://tinyurl.com/Undocumented HealthSacramento). But last week things changed. Supervisors Phil Serna and Patrick Kennedy worked hard over the past six months, and supervisors unanimously voted to reinstate health care. This means that the county will spend $6.6 million to provide health services to 3,000 immigrants, beginning next year. More than $1 million of this will come from local hospitals and doctors. Great news. But … not great enough. There remain still tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants in Sacramento that will still be without care. I’m looking forward to continued effort from Serna and Kennedy to fill that gap. That said, these two have elevated the county’s priorities. To your health, sirs, you are appreciated.

05 STREETALK 06 OPINION + letters 09 SCOREKEEPER 12 NEWS 15 FEATuRE 20 ARTS&CuLTuRE 22 NIgHT&DAy 23 DISH 29 STAgE 30 FILM 32 MuSIC + sound Advice 38 ASK JOEy 43 THE 420 55 15 MINuTES bites is on vacation this week. coveR DesiGn bY bRian bReneman

McCord, Kel Munger, Kate Paloy, Patti Roberts, Ann Martin Rolke, Shoka Creative Director Priscilla Garcia Art Director Hayley Doshay Associate Art Director Brian Breneman Ad Design Manager Serene Lusano Production Coordinator Skyler Smith Designers Brad Coates, Kyle Shine Contributing Photographers Lisa Baetz, Steven Chea, Evan Duran, Wes Davis, Luke Fitz, Taras Garcia, Michael Miller, Bobby Mull, Shoka, Darin Smith, Lauran Worthy

Our Mission To publish great newspapers that are successful and enduring. To create a quality work environment that encourages employees to grow professionally while respecting personal welfare. To have a positive impact on our communities and make them better places to live. Co-editors Rachel Leibrock, Nick Miller Staff Writers Janelle Bitker, Raheem F. Hosseini Assistant Editor Anthony Siino Entertainment Editor Jonathan Mendick Editorial Coordinator Becca Costello Contributing Editor Cosmo Garvin Editor-at-large Melinda Welsh Interns Jaime Carrillo, Meg Masterson Contributors Daniel Barnes, Ngaio Bealum, Alastair Bland, Rob Brezsny, Jim Carnes, Deena Drewis, Joey Garcia, Blake Gillespie, Lovelle Harris, Jeff Hudson, Jim Lane, Meg Masterson, Garrett

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Is the vaping industry marketing to kids?

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“I always bite my tongue to keep my family going.”

Asked at the intersection of Verner Avenue and Garfield Avenue:

When did you choose to be kind?

Jeanette Hawthrone homemaker

My realization was when I became a Christian. … You think about everything, like how you treat people. One of the more defining things is how I perceive myself and how I come across to others. You don’t know what importance they have in the world. You don’t know what kind of day they are having; you just don’t know.

Alexanderia Eck

Michael Dwyer

homemaker

disabled

I am already a kind person. I was raised that way. I think I am too kind and people walk all over me. I always bite my tongue to keep my family going. When we fight or something, I bite my tongue so we could still be family and not have problems between us. I really don’t stand up for myself.

Nancy Baughman

Rebecca Tocci

retired

I am kind. It is hard to try and be mean. It doesn’t work. In school, sometimes I had to stand up for myself, but what really stands out is when I have to stand up to my family. I fold. When someone asks, most of the time I will jump and run to help. I am dependable. My lady knows.

Kimberly Larson

cosmetologist

I hope I am a kind person. One of the fruits of the spirit is kindness. I hope I was always kind. Oh sure, we all have to bite our tongue and I did have that growing up. I teach my children how to treat each other correctly.

I try to help out as much as I can. Some people have to work at it; I believe that. I think we kind of learn over time what you can and cannot say. You learn what is wrong and what is right. You just stop before you say it. I learned that when I was younger.

supervisor

I am a lot kinder now than 10 years ago. I think a lot of it has to do with getting older. Instead of taking advantage of situations, I have learned to give back. Used to be that it was all about me, back in the day. I try to do one kind act a day to give back.

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THINK FREE.

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A recent story from the Center for Investigative Reporting caught our attention with its headline: “Want to carry a concealed gun? Live in Sacramento, not San Francisco.” CIR’s reporter, Matt Drange, compiled statistics on active concealed carry permits throughout the state and interviewed Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones. The entire story is interesting, but particularly because only Fresno, Kern and Shasta counties have more concealed carry permits issued than Sacramento County. Sacramento County had 5,769 active concealed carry permits as of the end of 2014. In comparison, San Francisco had two. The point made by the CIR story is that concealed carry permits, even in a state where firearms are as heavily regulated as California, are generally left to the discretion of one elected official: the county sheriff. It’s only fair to point out that the vast majority of gun crimes are not committed by people with concealed carry permits. Jones has created a three-person committee to vet applicants for a permit, and the process is fairly easy to navigate for a responsible gun owner. But it’s also fair to point out that researchers have found that a similarly strenuous process for buying guns in Connecticut has led to a 40 percent drop in the homicide rate in the last decade. It’s not so much that responsible gun owners prevent or discourage crime; it’s far more likely that limiting ownership of firearms to responsible people limits the possibility of crime. Given the nation’s latest mass shooting—this one at a church in Charleston, S.C.—the vetting of owners of firearms can’t possibly hurt and might actually help. More than anything else, treating firearms more like cars—both valueneutral machines that are capable of tragic misuse in the wrong hands—is a common-sense argument for public safety. Ω

Uneasy medicine Beyond alarming. That’s our reaction to learning of Senate Bill 538’s passage in the California Senate. The bill, now in the Assembly, would expand the scope of practice for naturopathic practitioners in California to allow them to perform minor procedures and to prescribe some medications, including antibiotics. It would also allow naturopaths to take patients off medications prescribed by a physician. This, from the same Legislature that is very sensibly moving forward to support evidence-based medicine where vaccination is concerned, can only be perceived as a step backward. Naturopathic practitioners do not have the stringent internship, residency and board supervision that a medical doctor completes. What’s more, many naturopaths practice homeopathy. For those who are unfamiliar with homeopathy, it’s based on the concept of diluting substances to an infinitesimal amount and then essentially prescribing the resulting water as a medicine. And it’s about as far from science as you can get. While we certainly don’t want to prevent adults from freely choosing alternative medicine, nor do we wish to discourage the ongoing scientific investigation of traditional and complementary medicine, we must strongly oppose the effort to expand naturopaths’ scope of services into the realm reserved for evidence-based medicine. The potential for harm to patients is simply too great, and so we must join the California Medical Association in urging that this bill be defeated. Ω

“VIBRANT, FRESH AND FUNNY...

AS EXPANSIVE AS THE MIGHTY STREAM IT CELEBRATES.”

Sacto as Hunger Games

–ASSOCIATED

Re “Sprawl on” by Cosmo Garvin (SN&R Bites, June 18): Cosmo Garvin rants against Sacramento’s urban sprawl while gushing over the draconian urban-growth boundaries that are imposed on the people of Portland, Ore. Has Garvin ever lived in Portland? I used to live in that dreary shithole of a city known as Portland, that is full of radical leftists and environmental extremists who were always cramming their leftist agendas down everyone’s throats. letter of Portland’s urban-growth boundary and land-rationing the week policies have had a devastating impact on housing affordability while cramming more and more people into a limited area. Housing costs are extremely high and so are the rents. Radical leftists and environmental extremists want everyone to live like in The Hunger Games, where the average citizens are made to live in stack-and-pack apartments that they do not own, while they reside inside one of the few megacities with extremely densely populated living conditions.

PRESS

ENDS SUNDAY!

Anonymous

via email

Preach!

small wage. But both sides of the coin have to be looked at. Carole Israel Freeman via email

Re “Sprawl on” by Cosmo Garvin (SN&R Bites, June 18): Thank you for the spot-on Bites column. Garvin accurately portrays the parade of clueless sycophants Veganism a masquerading as public-policy healthy answer visionaries while they serve the agenda of their billionaire masters Re “Step up your meatless game” and ignore public sentiment. His by Ann Martin Rolke (SN&R Dish, world-weary tone and the description June 11): of their shameless opportunism is both I don’t see the problem with breathtaking and brief. As far as I’m fake meat. It is often much better concerned, you could republish this nutritionally than what it is replacing. column every issue until the sleepFake bacon is a good example: It walkers electing the city and county is often fried tempeh, a veritable governments wake up. superfood that is fermented soybeans As one Australian planner loaded with vitamins, protein and described our local planning pracantioxidants, while bacon is loaded tices: “You Yanks don’t consult with saturated fat that the human the wisdom of democracy; you body cannot use at all. I think that enable mobs.” Garden To Grill and its predecessor, Of course, we’re not alone. The Plum, has done a big favor for Describing New York, planning Midtown residents: They are the only expert Jane Jacobs said, “The pseuvegan restaurants in the history of doscience of planning seems almost Midtown. neurotic in its determination to imitate Don Knutson empiric failure and ignore empiric Sacramento success.” Unfortunately, Sacramento’s online buzz local government never seems to miss an opportunity to miss an On what Sn&R miSSed in the BeSt Of opportunity. the BuRBS iSSue: Name withheld You missed a lot. Shady Coffee, via email Better Foods Deli, Nela’s or delicious el pastor tacos at Taqueria Tapatio , the cement slide park not far from the Miners Ravine Trail, live music at the Trocadero on Friday nights, Antique Trove on Harding or shopping on Vernon Street, Dimple Records, creepy/ awesome Almond Tree for karaoke, a play a Roseville Theater or Tower, a local beer at Monk’s and....duh... Denio’s!

Minimum wage costs more Re “Tipping point” by Nick Miller (SN&R News, June 11): It is easy for a non-business owner to say wage increases really don’t affect a business. They don’t see all of the costs for an employee, like workers-comp rates going up because premiums are based on wages paid. So not only does a business owner have a wage increase, but payroll taxes and workers-comp rates also increase. This is not to say that employees don’t deserve raises, or that it is incredibly hard to live on a BEFORE

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SCORE KEEPER Sacramento’s winners and losers—with arbitrary points

What the putt?!

Hella week

This week, the U.S. Senior Open will go down at Sacramento’s Del Paso Country Club—but Scorekeeper still can’t get golfer Dustin Johnson’s choke-job threeputt out of its head. So sad, so embarrassing.

On Monday morning, Davis Beer Week announced on Facebook that it was canceled. Organizers said it was due to difficult-to-navigate Alcohol Beverage Control laws. But then, in the afternoon, Davis Beer Week uncanceled. Confusing. But we like it.

-3

+ 530

Madness of King Vivek It’s more than just draft-season rumormongering when nearly every NBA media personality publishes a ditty on DeMarcus Cousins leaving Sacramento. Whether it’s because coach George Karl wants him gone or whatever, Boogie knows that the situation at Kings HQ is a shitshow, that Vivek is mad—and that leaving is a pretty smart career move. But we hope the 24-year-old stays!

- 916 Never ever deejay, please

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Hillary Clinton released

YOU’RE WELCOME, NATURE.

a personalized Spotify playlist last week. It includes Pharrell’s “Happy” (of flipping course!), plus songs by Bon Jovi and Katy Perry. Enough said.

- 270 ‘Endearingly stupid’

Don’t forget to floss

SN&R’s resident critic of all things fast and furiously disgusting, Gastronomicon columnist Anthony Siino, sampled Pizza Hut’s new Hot Dog Bites pie last week. For those not in the know, this is a pizza, but with mini hot dogs circumventing the cheese and replacing the crust (comes with mustard). Siino’s verdict: “It’s endearingly stupid.” Read more at http://tinyurl.com/ q2to3oz.

Kevin Johnson hosted mayors from across the country last week in San Francisco as part of the national U.S. Conference of Mayors gathering. President Obama showed up (he called K.J. “Dennis”), and our mayor said that the future Sacramento should have “more smart devices than toothbrushes.” Two thoughts: That’s dumb, and yo breath stink, Sacto.

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Saving black lives Sacramento County does the right thing by funding plan to curb child deaths

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THINK FREE.

How much is a human life worth? What resources should we dedicate to protecting our children? What should we do if, when we do nothing, more than 800 of our community’s children will die over the next 20 years? What should we do if a single group is nearly twice as likely to lose a child than the community as a whole? With a community effort, how many children could we save? These are the questions that were raised by the Sacramento County Child Death Review Team report that studied the 816 children who died in l by Jeff VonKaene Sacramento County between 1990 and 2009. The report zeroed in on the disproportionate number of j ef f v@ne wsreview.c om black children who die prematurely. While these children represent 12 percent of the child population, they represent 22 percent of child fatalities. While many would look at these grim statistics as an unfortunate aspect of life in 21st century America, Sacramento County Supervisor Phil Serna saw the numbers differently. Serna often sees things differently than other elected officials. There are some public officials who hope to run for higher office. They are always looking for issues that will take them there. There are some cynical public officials who focus on channeling resources toward “their people.” And then there are those idealists who believe that government can make a real difference in people’s lives, and that our community’s best side can be expressed through governWith a community ment. Serna is such an idealist. Serna believed that it would effort, how many be possible, with properly children could we save? allocated resources, to make a difference and save lives. Serna believed we could reduce the number of children who would die because of deaths related to prenatal conditions, To learn more sudden infant death syndrome and homicides related to and to read the child abuse and neglect. strategic plan, With Serna’s leadership, things started to happen. “African-American Children Matter: The disproportionate number of black child deaths was What We Must Do no longer just a sad number. It was a benchmark number Now,” go to that our community needed to reduce. First 5 Sacramento www.shfcenter. Commission got involved. Sierra Health Foundation got org/raacd. involved. A task force was formed. A strategic plan was developed. The plan, “African-American Children Matter: What We Must Do Now,” focused on the neighborhoods with a disproportionate amount of child deaths. This plan will require many community partners and multiple approaches to solve the problems. But a plan without resources is not an effective plan. Jeff vonKaenel is the president, So, last week, 300 people packed the board of supervisors CEO and meeting to ask for funding, and $1.5 million annually for majority owner of the News & Review five years was granted. These resources are now available newspapers in for an engaged community that has a plan. Sacramento, We will not know the names of the children who will Chico and Reno. not die. We cannot know which funeral did not happen because of better prenatal care. We cannot know which baby did not stop breathing in her crib. We cannot know which child will not be fatally abused. But with this plan, and with these resources that have been allocated, many of our community’s children will now be saved. Ω

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Bloody in Midtown Three Sacramento musicians stabbed for wearing skinny jeans Fishing, swimming in the river, barbecue, drinks—local musician Blake Abbey and his friends were having a classic summertime by Sunday in Sacramento. That is, until he ended up stabbed Nick Miller and bleeding-out on the streets of Midtown just before midnight. ni ck am@ newsr eview.c om “The knife went all the way through my arm,” Abbey told SN&R from his hospital bed at UC Davis Medical Center. “He stuck it all the way through my arm, coast to coast.” This all happened as Abbey and his musician buddies were minding their own business, walking to The Press Club on 21st Street. The four men—including Abbey’s brother, Bradley, and two members of the hugely popular local hardcore rock troupe Slaves, Alex Lyman and Wes Richmond— were goofing around, walking arm in arm, until they stopped near O Street, because they heard two guys hollering. “They start yelling at us, talking shit,” says Abbey, who heads the local band Musical Charis. The men stood near a motorcycle parked in front of Alley Katz and allegedly called Abbey and his friends “faggots,” making fun of their skinny jeans, he says. And then, “literally within seconds,” one of the men, Timothy Brownell, 25, allegedly brandished a knife. “The knife was fucking huge,” Abbey remembered, comparing it to a blade you’d see in a Rambo movie. His brother pleaded for Brownell to drop it. The others begged and yelled, too. But then Brownell allegedly swung it at Slaves guitarist Richmond, slicing him across the stomach. Abbey saw his shirt rip. He saw blood. Meanwhile, Brownell’s accomplice continued trashtalking at Abbey. “The guy was running his mouth, ‘You’re so lucky we don’t have guns, you would’ve been killed by now.’” This was around the time Abbey felt a knife enter his flesh. “He put the knife through my arm, then pulled it,” he explained. Bloodied and in a panic, he ran toward Press Club, where a woman helped him by grabbing towels and wrapping his arm. Someone else called 911. On Monday, Abbey was recovering in the hospital, where doctors used seven packets of stitches to zip up his 12-inch-long gash. Lyman was treated for a stab wound near his ribs, which nearly pierced his spleen, according to Abbey, and lacerations on his neck. Richmond has a broken A fundraiser for the stabbing victims, hand and is wearing a hard cast. called “#iwearskinny Slaves, which boasts 94,000 fans on Facebook, was jeans,” is Saturday, scheduled to join the Warped Tour this weekend, in June 27, at 10 p.m. addition to headlining Concerts in the Park this Friday at Pour House, 1910 Q Street. night. Both shows will go on, but Richmond will be out of Donations go commission for months. to the victims. Abbey was supposed to drive the Slaves tour van during Performances by the Warped jaunt, but he’s not sure now. James Cavern, Carly DuHain and more. The suspect, Brownell, was arrested after a witness (The organizers urge identified him and lead police to his home, where they all attendees to wear found illegal firearms. He was charged for those, and for their favorite skinny assault with a deadly weapon, but he posted bail and was jeans, of course.) out by early morning. Sacramento police are now calling this attack a hate crime, and there is a new warrant out for Brownell’s arrest. The musicians will recover, but they’re still a bit stunned. “Wish the world could stop hating what they don’t understand,” Lyman wrote on Instagram. Ω 12

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A tectonic shift After nearly two decades of uncertainty, lawmakers appear ready to greenlight policy regulating medical pot Marijuana isn’t legal in California yet, but it could become even more legit going into next year’s legalization debate. by David Downs The Golden State’s billion-dollar medicalcannabis industry stands a good chance of getting its first-ever state-level regulations this year. Here in the Capitol, Assembly Bill 266 passed by a landslide vote—62-8—on the Assembly floor earlier this month, on June 4, and experts say it faces decent odds of passing the state Senate and being signed by Gov. Jerry Brown. If that happens, California finally will begin regulating the cultivation and distribution of medical cannabis, as called for by voters 19 years ago when they passed Proposition 215 and kicked off the modern era of medical pot. “We watched history getting made,” said Nate Bradley, lobbyist for the California Cannabis Industry Association, referring to the Assembly floor vote. “The votes came out and it was just a powerhouse—boom, 50. Then it went to 62. Even some ‘no’ votes flipped. That many votes is nothing but a win.” A.B. 266 is an unprecedented compromise— the merging of one police-crafted bill and one that was more industry-leaning. It is co-authored by local Assemblyman Ken Cooley, the Democrat from Rancho Cordova, and would spread regulatory authority over seven state agencies, with oversight by the governor’s office. It creates 20 specific business licenses for the commercial medical-cannabis industry. “Local jurisdictions were on board—[along with] industry, patients, the reform movement, unions, the medical board; it’s really kind of historic that happened,” said Hezekiah Allen, director of the Emerald Growers Association, which represents small pot farmers. Assemblyman Rob Bonta, who also co-authored the bill, said in an interview that his bill would benefit patients and collectives by “fully bringing the industry out of the shadows.” The bill also could end the federal crackdown by installing the strong state controls, which the U.S. Department of Justice has demanded. “By implementing this stronger regime throughout California, it adds a greater chance and a higher level of protection against that type of federal intervention we’ve seen in the past,” Bonta explained. A.B. 266 now heads to the Senate, where medical pot regulations have already passed two key litmus tests, beginning with a healthcommittee hearing on July 7.

Last year, a regulatory bill from then-Senator Lou Correa cleared the Senate before it died in the Assembly. The Senate also voted this year to pass pot regulations from Senator Mike McGuire. “I think that those are good signs,” Bonta said. “I think there’s some inter-house dynamics that can get tricky. This is when things get a little more difficult.” Regulations could cost $10 million annually, but would be financed mostly by licensing fees. There are an estimated 40,000 cultivation sites throughout California, and an estimated 4,000 medical-marijuana dispensaries. We’re also seeing unprecedented buy-in from California’s sprawling bureaucracy, and the Brown administration. Under the proposed law, the state Board of Equalization would have employees assigned full-time to a task force on cannabis taxation. The state water board would focus on water regulations. And other state agencies also would be mobilized. “From what we’ve been told, divisions are already preparing,” Bradley said of the state agencies. “Everyone has people assigned to look at this issue.”

photo illustration by brian breneman

BEATS

What’s the 311?

Lawmakers could very well pass some of the most significant marijuana-regulation policy in the past two decades this session.

The bill also creates a first-ever oversight role for the governor’s office to ensure accountability and to sort out regulatory overlap. Allen of the Emerald Growers Association said he had heard that the governor’s office “was part of the conversation through which the bills were merged.” Opposition to A.B. 266 is mostly coming from hardcore marijuana activists and lawenforcement groups; the former want fewer regulations—and the latter simply want marijuana to be illegal. The bill would have mixed effects on patient rights. The legislation exempts patients who do not “provide, donate, sell, or distribute cannabis to any other person” or entity from having to get a license, as well as primary caregivers who have up to five patients. But the bill also continues the patchwork of bans and restrictions on cultivation and distribution that have been enacted by about half of California’s cities. Patients in places such as Sacramento County and Fresno, as a result, would remain behind enemy lines.

But statewide rules should ease local bans over time, Bradley said. Local pot industry tax revenue is “also going to be another huge motivating factor.”

“ By implementing this stronger regime throughout California, it adds a greater chance and a higher level of protection against that type of federal intervention we’ve seen in the past.” Assemblyman Rob Bonta “It won’t address the patchwork overnight, but it will start standardizing the elements of regulations [that] locals can customize,” Allen added. All in all, a tectonic shift in California policy is occurring. “A revolution is underway in how we talk about

B E F O R E | N E W S | F E A T U R E S T O R Y |

cannabis and nowhere is that revolution more obvious than in the legislature,” said Allen. “We’re really excited with where this bill is,” Bonta said. “I think it’s historic. It’s unique. We’ve never seen a bill of this nature on this topic have this much momentum at this stage in the process.” If California sorts out its regulations in 2015, the stage will be set for adult-use legalization next year in the eighth largest economy in the world, thereby possibly bringing the century-long war on marijuana to an end. Next month, on July 7, the Blue Ribbon Commission on Marijuana Policy, which includes Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom as a member, plans to release its year-and-a-halfin-the-making report on the good and bad of marijuana legalization in California. The report is considered a road map for groups aiming to legalize pot in California on the November 2016 ballot. Groups such as ReformCA aim to put a marijuana-legalization referendum on the 2016 ballot and must gather at least 585,000 signatures to qualify. Ω

A RT S & C U LT U R E

A recent city audit shows that Sacramento’s 24-hour hotline for reporting nonemergency problems like water waste, leaf piles or stray animals functioned at less than half its service level goal for fiscal year 2014. This was the first audit of Sacramento City 311 since the centralized call center system began in 2008. According to the audit, only 31 percent of calls were answered within 60 seconds, which is the standard for falling within service level. Based on the staffing and resources available, the audit says the call center should be able to answer 39 percent of calls within 60 seconds. The city’s service-level goal is 80 percent. Presenting his underwhelming findings to a Sacramento City Council subcommittee on June 2, City Auditor Jorge Oseguera pointed to ills likely caused by a combination of inadequate staffing, too few supervisors and a lack of agent accountability. “I think it’s probably been bad for a long time,” he said. In some cases, the audit results were baffling. For example, responses to calls were doubly slow on Mondays. But staff was twice as productive as predicted on Fridays and Saturdays, when the call center is less likely to have a supervisor present. Oseguera speculated that city residents and visitors call with more complex issues earlier in the week, tying up the agents available. Last year, 20 agents and three supervisors handled 341,658 requests. And the center itself had a supervisor-to-agent ratio far below that of many other comparable call centers around the country, even those that are not open around the clock. City council’s recent approval of two additional full-time call center agents and one full-time call center specialist at a cost of $231,000 is predicted to increase service levels by 72 percent over current numbers. Other fixes include after-call surveys beginning in September, better monitoring software and upgrades to the 311 mobile app and knowledge base. Oseguera said his office will next check on the call center’s progress in January. (Brooke Purves)

Diversifying education The fourth most diverse school district in the nation is finally adding an ethnic studies graduation requirement—in 2020. The Sacramento City Unified School District’s Board of Trustees unanimously approved the proposal from its Student Advisory Council on June 4. The proposal will create an ethnic studies pilot program for fall 2016. In collaboration with community organizations, local university professors and college students, the council cited research that minority students feel culturally disconnected from the standard curriculum in high school classes, particularly in literature and history classes. Students also reported little interaction between different ethnic groups on campus. Approximately 80 percent of district students identify as students of color. There’s also a significant English-learner population—with at least 44 recognized languages—and large European immigrant populations to boot. Jonathan Tran, an organizer with Hmong Innovating Politics and a past school board candidate, worked on the ethnic studies campaign. He said such courses improve campus climate and graduation rates. “Students begin to see themselves in the curriculum,” he said. “They become more invested in the subject they’re studying.” In a last-minute amendment to the proposal, the new requirement will be monitored by the district’s High School Graduation Task Force, a relatively new committee that hasn’t been meeting. The task force will be responsible for making sure ethnic studies courses satisfy graduation requirements, and incorporating ethnic-studies elements in classes across the board. Director Theresa McEwen said the task force is currently on hiatus and awaiting new assessments from Common Core implementation. (B.P.)

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Do we ever remember what really happened? Local scientists explain why our memories are so inaccurate.

melindaw@newsreview.com

I’ve been re-experiencing my youth lately as DVDs that replay at random times inside my own head. Sometimes, it’s the one where I’m rushed to the emergency room, age 10, after accidentally stabbing myself in the guts while climbing the spiky gate in front of my childhood home. Or when my bike-riding brother was hit by a car. Or when my father, home from the hospital, gathered his children in the back bedroom to tell us that our cancer-stricken mother, age 45, had “gone home to God.” It’s not surprising that my brain films usually contain highly emotional or fear-charged content, since those are ones we all are said to recall most vividly, and with the greatest detail. But recently I’ve wondered: Are these memories even accurate? Consider the Brian Williams episode. If you discard the notion that he lied outright, the former NBC news anchor’s inability to distinguish fact from fiction in recounting his 2003 helicopterin-Iraq tale received a near-universal shrug from memory scientists, if not media pundits, who said the occurrence was not that big a deal. Turns out, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton—to name just a few White House types—have all been caught on tape merging an emotional tale from the past with what’s known as a “prestige enhanced memory distortion.” But when New York Times media critic David Carr, 58, died in February less than a week after Williams went off the air, I took it as evidence that it was time to explore the topic of memory. I knew the renowned columnist and former alternative weekly editor a bit,

and his newsroom death sent me back to his 2008 memoir, The Night of the Gun. In it, Carr investigated his own volatile life’s events and basically discovered that his memories were vastly unreliable. “Memory,” he concluded, “uses the building blocks of fiction—physical detail, arc, character, and consequence—to help us explain ourselves to ourselves and to others.” Well, the possibility that our memories suffer from truthiness seems especially weighty today, what with the world’s population living longer than ever, baby boomers confronting age-related memory loss in record numbers and disorders like Alzheimer’s disease readying to avalanche the health-care system. There’s no doubt that the human brain—and how it encodes, stores and retrieves information—has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years and is surely one of the most remarkably complex marvels to be found in the universe. The memory is genius, serving as a GPS (with astonishing spatial navigation capacity), interactive Rolodex (cross-indexing people, places and things with dexterity) and personal encyclopedia (sparing us from having to learn the same things over and over). But even given all that—just how flawed are our memories? Is it possible that some of our most treasured ones never really happened? Can false memories really be planted inside our brains? Finally, in this age of exponential self-documentation, will our memories’ fallibility become more or less relevant? continued on page 16

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I didn’t have to look much farther than the Sacramento region for answers. UC Davis, in particular, is home to many of the world’s top neuroscientists, psychologists and academics in the realm of recall. And you’ll be surprised at what they had to say about your memory.

The stuff inside the brain Jordan Crivelli-Decker—a graduate student with a giant white smile and face like Michael Cera, the teenage love interest in Juno—sits inside what looks like a double-wide refrigerator located on the second floor of the UC Davis Center for Neuroscience. A lab manager for the campus’ Dynamic Memory Lab, he’s inside this soundproof booth to demonstrate what it’s like to undergo a particular memory experiment: an EEG, or electroencephalogram. Two female principals of the DML team apply hair gel-type goo to dozens

Jordan Crivelli-Decker, a lab manager in UC Davis Professor Charan Ranganath’s Dynamic Memory Lab, is seen here as the subject of an EEG, a standard working memory test. The hair gel-type goo being applied serves as a conductor between the electrodes and Crivelli-Decker’s brain, helping improve accuracy in measuring patterns of brain activity. PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY DARIN SMITH

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of small, metal discs attached to a stretchy purple cap on Crivelli-Decker’s head. They fasten wires and plug everything into a computer, with the gel serving as a kind of conductor between the electrodes and the subject’s brain. Seated at a keyboard, closed into the cubicle, Crivelli-Decker begins tapping out responses to a standard working memory test. The goal of the EEG is to monitor small amounts of electric currents the brain produces and, sure enough, we’re soon looking at a computer readout of a memory at work. The trial is just one of several used “to measure stuff inside the brain” in the lab of prefrontal cortex rock star Charan Ranganath, a cognitive neuroscientist and UCD psychology professor. “The currents are very, very tiny,” said Ranganath. “But when there’s populations of tens of thousands of cells operating in sync,” he says, you can see patterns of brain activity.

Ranganath—a charismatic young scientist who loves Twitter, guitar bands (“noise rock, math rock”) and cognitive neuroscience—won a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship recently for his work on Alzheimer’s disease. “We’re trying to figure out how different brain areas code for different pieces of information,” he explains. In addition to the EEG, Ranganath’s crew uses eye-tracking techniques and fMRIs (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to track areas of activity in the brain so as to better learn how it files and retrieves information. There are multiple institutions at UC Davis that research the mind and memory, with authorities of all kinds laboring in each one. But there’s something they all seem to agree on: Memories are not as accurate as most of us believe they are. Basically, every time a person recalls an experience, that memory is opened up for potential change. In remembering,

you are actually reconstructing a memory. Once an event is over, it’s gone, says Ranganath. “All you have is the story you created. It’s more like bits of sights, sounds and words stored in different parts of the brain that you put together into a story. “You ask anybody who does memory work and they’ll tell you that,” he says. “Nothing’s true in memory.” Ranganath calls himself “part of a movement” of scientists who believe that the brain makes a “pretty fundamental distinction between two halves … the ‘who’ and the ‘what’ parts, and the ‘when,’ ‘where’ and ‘how’ parts.” One half concerns itself with information about people and things, and the other is devoted to the context in which you encounter those people and things. “When you track different features of memories, there are parts that track the objective part of what really happened [who and what], and then there’s brain

areas that follow much more the mental construction [when, where, how]—the story we tell ourselves.” The later realm, with the context, is where the brain gets a bit creative in recall, and tends to generate a “story” around what actually happened. When I mention to Ranganath that I’d often experienced a memory from childhood as a video, he agrees that’s how most people think it works: The mind records an event, then plays it back. But that’s wrong, he says. “It’s not like you’re pulling a book off the shelf and putting it back on the shelf,” he said. “It’s more like pulling it off, doing a little bit of scribbling in it, then putting it back.” And what about out-and-out memory failures, regardless of our tendency to “reconstruct” some of the context? Memory can fall short for various reasons, he explained. Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, stroke, brain

trauma—all can seriously disrupt recall processes. And plenty of people experience run-of-the-mill memory failure simply because they didn’t pay enough attention at the time of “encoding,” when the brain takes the first step in processing a new memory. But simply getting older is the main culprit when it comes to most failing memories. In normal aging, the hippocampus shrinks naturally, resulting in an increased loss of details, such as names or where you last placed an object (like your keys). Is there hope for the average person facing memory loss due to aging? Ranganath’s advice is simple: Make sure to get exercise (30 minutes a day), try to get enough sleep and reduce chronic stress. “Those are as good as we have right now,” he shrugs. “Our brain cells require energy to do what they do, and you want to be able to deliver that as quickly as possible. A brain that can rapidly get the glucose it needs—that brain has the advantage.” Still, for most people, memory “improves until you hit college age,” he says. The professor holds his hand up high, as if it’s an airplane that’s taken flight. “Then it starts to decline,” he laughs. “From 30 on, it’s …” Ranganath moves his hand swiftly downward, crashing the plane.

Famous blue Icee When you were 5 years old, you got lost in the shopping mall. Remember? Your mom gave you some money to buy a blue Icee, you ran ahead and somehow got turned around. This elderly Chinese lady found you, right? Then your mom appeared and took you to get the Icee. The above is a fictional tale, spun by experimental psychologist Beth Loftus, one of the world’s leading authorities on memory. Loftus, now a professor of psychology and professor of law at UC Irvine, has testified in hundreds of courtrooms, mostly for the defense in criminal cases, as an expert on the human mind’s ability to distort memories. Loftus invented the “lost in the mall” story—and many other such narratives—to demonstrate that she could implant false memories in human minds. The result: She could. By merely suggesting the “lost” scenario to 24 adults, six came to fully believe that they’d actually been lost in the mall. “We can easily distort memories and implant memories,” Loftus told SN&R flat out. “There is no question that memories can be contaminated.” In fact, Loftus has a three-step “recipe” for how to plant a fake memory, whether purposefully or not. (Hint: It’s

not how Leonardo DiCaprio did it in Inception.) First, you must possess the subject’s trust. Second, you plant the seed of an incident with specific detail (like the blue Icee). Third, you coax the subject to imagine the scene unfolding. In the mid-1980s and early ’90s, the recipe was what some therapists unknowingly followed to “recover” incest memories from their clients’ childhoods. Loftus and others eventually proved that many of these recollections were false and had been unwittingly “implanted.” Her work has perhaps a more verifiable parallel in mice. Just last March, French neuroscientists successfully implanted false memories into the brains of sleeping mice, confirming findings from previous studies. Using electrodes to stimulate and monitor the activity of nerve cells in the mice, they created fake memories that changed mice behavior when they awoke.

the most convincing, powerful evidence you can have,” said Qin. But it’s often not good evidence, he said. The Innocence Project (a nonprofit legal organization dedicated to upending guilty verdicts with genetic evidence) found that more than 70 percent of convictions overturned through DNA testing were based on eyewitness testimony. Qin conducts a basic exercise in his cognitive psychology class at Sac State. “I ask them to remember the last time they had a fight with their significant other,” he said. “Then I say, ‘How many of you remember something that happened in a different way than your significant other did?’” All the hands go up, he laughed. “At some level,” he said, “people know memory is not always trustworthy.” According to Ranganath, the fallibility of our recall system is not a flaw, just a fact. “Even when people think they’re

Every time a person recalls an experience, that memory is opened up for potential change. In remembering, you are actually reconstructing a memory.

Locally, UC Davis neuroscientist Brian Wiltgen has done similar work, using light (as with the memory-erasing stick in Men in Black?) to actually erase specific memories in mice. Another local expert in the recall field is Jianjian Qin, a Sacramento State psychology professor who studies the mechanisms of memory in humans. Qin (who studied at UC Davis under psychologist Gail S. Goodman, another local memory guru) conducted research that indicated it was indeed possible to get adults to believe an event occurred in their childhood that actually did not. His work, co-published in 2008 with others in The Journal of Experimental Psychology, went on to show that people are basically no good at differentiating between their “fake” and “real” memories. “Confidence does not equate with accuracy,” Qin said. “If you have an eyewitness sitting there in a courtroom, pointing to the defendant, saying, ‘He’s the one,’ that’s

telling you what actually happened, they’re making it up,” he said. “And you have to. If you didn’t do that, you’d have a memory disorder.” Ranganath believes our brains developed the way they did to best “predict our future based on our past.” “It’s not like our brains evolved to remember with precision a 16th birthday party or a first date or something,” he said. “Those things don’t give you much survival power.” Ranganath theorizes that the human brain is simply not designed to enable us to accurately remember each and every detail about events that are nonessential from an evolutionary or “survival” standpoint. However, brain functions and memories which enhance our ability to adapt and survive—say, by enabling us to size up an individual or situation that may pose a threat—tend to be more truthful. “What gives you survival power is the ability to use information to do things in the future that are adaptive.

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“ Nothing’s true in memory.” Charan Ranganath cognitive neuroscientist and UC Davis psychology professor

Prefrontal cortex expert Charan Ranganath, a psychology professor at UC Davis, is fascinated by how the brain codes, files and retrieves memories. “Once an event is over, it’s gone,” he said. “All you have is the story you created.” PHOTO BY DARIN SMITH

“Our brains are designed to take experiences we have and strip them like somebody might strip a car,” he said. And then figure out, “How can I use this in my world?”

thinks the answer is equal parts yes and no. The most accurate way of digging up history, i.e., remembering the narrative of our past events, used to be through people’s correspondence and personal diaries, he said. But both these modes are “almost dead,” replaced by Facebook and social media. “As we all know, Facebook is PR,” he said. “It’s used primarily to boast and show off the good side of things. That’s not very helpful when you’re trying to uncover what really happened.” Still, Drew believes the technology may hold its own cure. There’s a tendency, especially among the young, to engage in “memory testing,” he said. And the trend may catch fire enough to aid our collective memory going forward. “People throw out a memory of an event on social media, and people chime in and say, ‘Yes, it happened that way,’ or ‘No, it didn’t happen that way really, but I remember this,’” he said. “Social media doesn’t have to be PR. It can actually help hone your memory.” Drew said he’s seen a tendency, too, toward young people using social media for oral histories and to build “memory sites.” He referenced the many Facebook pages now dedicated to displaying collective memories, for example, of the ever-gentrifying Mission District in San Francisco, where he has a personal history. “People are starting to preserve memories more and test memories with other people,” he said. “There are a lot of great history projects out there.”

The future of memory Each of us has two selves, writes Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman. The esteemed behavioral economist used an infamous 2010 TED Talk to unpack how our “experiencing self” differs from our “remembering self.” “There’s a difference between being happy in your life and being happy with your life,” said the author of Thinking, Fast and Slow. He described how the self “which does the living” (the experiencing self) is completely different than the self that “maintains the story of our life” (the remembering self). The experiencing self lives in the present, he said. The remembering self compiles “stories” we reconstruct from our less-than-trustworthy memories for future reference. Kahneman’s theory manages to inspire a thoroughly modern question: How might social media—with its 24/7 ability to document what we are experiencing—impact our individual and collective recall going into the future? In other words, will it matter that we remember poorly if there’s backup evidence as to what really happened on Facebook or Instagram? Jesse Drew, a self-described “social media fanatic” who teaches media archeology as an associate professor of technocultural studies at UC Davis, BEFORE

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When asked for thoughts about science’s ability to “incept,” or implant, memories in human minds, Drew said it’s been there, done that. “The Nazis knew that, too,” he said. “History is what people write about history. It’s not really what happened.” Acutely aware of the failures of memory since his own mother suffers from Alzheimer’s, Drew encourages his young students to dig up some history of their own, find the oldest member of their extended family, “sit down and interview them” about their life while it’s possible. If some of the memories are not entirely accurate, he said, so be it. “Video is cheap,” he said, “and you can counter the fluff of Facebook with deeper storytelling and oral histories. … I think it’s starting to swing this way. People want more authenticity, a more in-depth understanding of their world and the people in their lives.”

You must remember this In the spirit of memory testing, I sought the help of my sister and brothers. I asked each to forage their brain for details about that shared, traumatic event from our childhood that I mentioned earlier: the one where we were told our mother had died. It turned out our memories varied, but only very little. It happened in daylight, we all agreed. The sun poured in through the louvered windows in the back bedroom, where my father asked his six children, all under the age of 12, to gather. Our

| A R T S & C U L T U R E

grandmother and an older cousin were also present, though a few of us don’t remember these two in attendance. My brothers recall spatial aspects, like where they were seated in the room, while my sister and I do not. We all remember our father delivering the awful news that our mother was never coming home again. We all recall crying together as a family. I’m the only one with a memory of my father’s exact words (“Your mother has gone home to God”), though after researching this story I realize that maybe the writer in me “reconstructed” the memory over the years with added dialogue from our Catholic upbringing. After sharing his memory, one of my brothers thanked me for dredging up his recall on this defining moment in our lives—“thanks, this has been healthy for me”—and, like a key in a lock, his words illuminated a paradox that had been hiding from me. There’s something more essential than the veracity of old memories. It’s the importance of recalling them, however reconstructed, with others, especially loved ones, in the present. In The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera writes: “There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact.” Or maybe our remembering selves don’t deserve that much credit. Perhaps it is the simple fact of our existence that we must struggle so fervently to experience life more frequently in the “tangible and palpable” here and now. Ω

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that’s always redefining itself—and the world

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DAYS

Istanbul

y the looks of things, a terrible disaster has befallen the Modus Hotel in Turkey, a five-story structure jutting awkwardly from a sharply tilted street. Medical bandages adorn the heads and faces of roughly a quarter of the denizens, some stained a light brown and coming loose around jagged surgical scars. Women with bandaged noses and puffy eyes. Men with gauze swaddling their

bald skulls, pinpricked a bright red as if from chemical burns.

Gawking sneakily in the first-floor dining nook, our travel party wonders which of the many conflicts pressing these borders is to blame. The horrific civil war in Syria? The reignited battle for control in Iraq? Thudding air strikes in Yemen? The Rohingyan migrant crisis? Some other foreign travesty? None of the above, it turns out. No, these walking wounded are casualties of a less dire conflict— the battle to look good. A cosmetic surgery center a few blocks away has made the hotel a choice locale for outpatient recovery. Travelers

of means fly in, hack and slash what they don’t like, and first-class it home. Welcome to Istanbul, a city for the remaking. Called Byzantium by Greek colonists, Constantinople under the Roman Empire and given its current name when the conquering Ottomans arrived, 14.2 million people stuff themselves into this transcontinental metropolis, which grazes two continents and borders two seas at the northwestern reaches of the country. Appropriately, the torch-shaped city feels very much like the thrumming center of the world. It shouldn’t work, mixing this many disparate ingredients—high

story and Photos by raheem f. hosseini raheemh@ne wsre vie w.com

Plastic surgery, stray dogs and tourist traPs mark a city

SEVEN

’ Murica! See NIGHT&DAY

indie ugh See FILM

But it also calls into contrast the city’s neglect of its equally legion—and visible—poor. Like the Syrian refugee who futilely presented his ID to passersby as a family of three trailed or the child beggars who pawed at our shirtsleeves, the visceral misfortune here stands out all the more because of the locale and its proximity to glimmering mosques and palaces. Or maybe it takes being a tourist to notice the human suffering that exists everywhere. After all, I couldn’t say whether Istanbul’s homeless population is greater than in major American cities or simply more exposed. There seems to be one universal truth wherever you go: After a while, you stop noticing.

fashion and modest dress, palaces and shopping malls of equal opulence, ancient sites amid constant development—yet somehow it does. Along with my father and brother, I’m here for seven days to explore the sights and meet some relatives for the first time. Cosmetic surgery isn’t on the menu, but that doesn’t mean Istanbul won’t leave its mark. i Must get to the bottoM of istanbul’s strayaniMals epideMic. Everywhere we walk, wild dogs and (some) cats litter the warm pavement, passed the hell out. On the way to Taksim Square, a dozen animals snooze in a small field, making it look like an unfinished pet cemetery. Outside of Topkapi Palace, two dogs slumber nose to rear. One has a red device implanted in its ear. During a visit to a nearby island, more sleepy carcasses, although there is one go-getter that runs beside our horse-drawn coach like it’s on security detail. At night, you can hear their vampire howls. I’m baffled and obsessed, taking more photos of unconscious animals than I do of the city itself. Is this by policy or freak occurrence? It’s not until I return stateside that I learn the answer. Apparently, Istanbul residents are so opposed to euthanizing stray animals that the local government has rolled out a campaign, outfitting the city with vending machines that dispense dog food whenever people deposit their recycled cans and bottles. These dispensers feed the city’s approximately 150,000 roaming dogs (though I also spotted little water and food dishes used by stray cats). Meanwhile, to cut down on rabies and humanely curtail population growth, local shelters trap, spay and vaccinate stray hounds, then release them back into their neighborhoods with little red markers implanted in their ears. It’s an elegant approach, one that’s received interest from more than 60 other countries, according to an interview last year in Der Spiegel with the vending invention’s creator. BEFORE

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here, w e are aMong ancient things repurposed as tourist trappings. An expansive square flecked with cafes and merchants bridges three of the city’s most alluring historical attractions—the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia and our first destination, Topkapi Palace. There’s a lot to absorb, but I keep leering at the people with the selfie sticks. It’s the first time I’ve seen one of these contraptions in real life, and there are throngs of them. A middle-aged Japanese tourist has hers attached to a belt and seems consumed by her own image—an ouroboros in a sun hat and fanny pack. Once past an enormous stone awning, snub-faced guards with machine guns stand like chess pawns near sacred relics—parchment scrolls loosely translated, snaggle-toothed keys the size of daggers and enough pointy weapons to arm a Game of Thrones LARPing club. These are ostensibly the swords of the Prophet Muhammad and his men, and the prophet claims the choicest steel of the bunch. His son Ali gets a big, rusty pig sticker that looks like it would be a beast to lift. Then again, a glass case displaying Ali’s wardrobe—a gigantic sackcloth Henley—makes it appear he was a beast of a man. So does a golden cast of the prophet’s foot. It’s wide and long and seems to belong to someone pushing 8 feet in height.

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about that sexless Marriage See ASK JOEY

froM addiction to avant-garde See 15 MINUTES

Istanbul’s stray dog population is subsidized by the government and citizens opposed to euthanization.

EvErywhErE wE walk, wild dogs and (somE) cats littEr thE warm pavEmEnt, passEd thE hEll out. I nudge my dad. “Look,” I crack, “Muhammad had six toes.” After taking in the sights of the first location, we stop at an outdoor cafe and request beer. The server gives us a look that says, “Only tourists would request booze this close to a holy site.” He’s obviously not Catholic. We order Turkish coffee instead, a sludgy brew served in doll cups that sends a lightning bolt to the brain. It’s like the time I tried cocaine, except more palatable. Our aunt Mahin shows us an old Turkish tradition by reading our fortunes in the streaks of the upturned cups. In mine, she glimpses the gaunt body of a goat, which bodes well for this Capricorn, she says. As our group exits the cafe toward the line for the Blue Mosque, a sudden downpour batters us. Not being dressed for the schizophrenic weather, my brother and I race for cover, to our father’s chagrin. He and the rest of the family soldier on, but return a short time later with quizzical grins. They say the mosque was beautiful, but all those soggy tourists removing their footwear made the place reek of feet. The Year of the Goat is already paying dividends. The rain has mostly lifted by the time we’re escorted to

a street-side table in front of the Baran Restaurant Ottoman Kitchen, a couple of blocks from the historical sites. The host, a proud Kurd, asks me where I’m from. When I say “California,” he mistakes my geographic specificity for Bush-era nerves. “You are American,” he corrects. “Don’t be afraid.” He claims that reporters from The Washington Post’s local bureau are among his best customers. I wouldn’t doubt it. We order food; the dish I get is like a shepherd’s pie encased in a fried and doughy potato crust. Inside is a steamy mélange of skewered lamb, green peppers, peas, carrots and a tangy sauce. It cooks my innards, and I chase it down with a chilled can of Turkey’s house beer, Efes. After, as we walk to the tram that brought us here, the call to afternoon prayer begins. An old, enfeebled voice dins the air. It’s unpleasant at first, but then the pain enters me. It’s forlorn, genderless, beautiful. On cue, thick pearls descend from the violet mantle above. Raindrops shotgun our shoulders as we run with desperate glee and a trio of schoolgirls sweeps us into the crowded train car with a storm of giggles. Ω

| A R T S & C U L T U R E

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For the week of June 25

’ve been accused of “hating America” numerous times. Usually it happens after I tell people that I’m not a fan of baseball or football, and that my favorite sport to watch is soccer. On the contrary, after recent wins by our men’s and women’s national soccer teams over quality teams from Australia, Germany and the Netherlands, I’m feeling pretty darn proud to be American right now. Yep: Nationalism is an important motivator when it comes to international sports (or war). I get it. However, I’m just not sure if I’m patriotic enough to attend this weekend’s annual Celebrate America Festival

(www.celebrateamericaonline.com), put on by Destiny Christian Church. But for people ready to break out their American flag shorts and tank tops (hey, it’ll be hot this weekend) even though it’s not even July 4 yet, here’s what to expect: Musical acts Phil Stacey (a finalist on season six of American Idol) and Generald Wilson (a Navy veteran turned pro singer)—plus a fireworks display, a “patriotic musical,” a Black Hawk helicopter, Navy SEALs parachuting into the festival and burgers from The Squeeze Inn. In all, it’s going to be a big one. According to the festival’s organizers, 35,000 people showed up last year.

It all happens at Twin Oaks Park, 5550 Park Drive in Rocklin, on Saturday, June 27, and Sunday, June 28. It’s free, but pets aren’t allowed. In fact, the festival’s fireworks have freaked out nearby pets in past years, according to articles in the Placer Herald. Other complaints have included parking and traffic issues, and the festival’s blatant celebration of Republican values (there have been tributes to Ronald Reagan in past years) and Christian evangelism. In other words, this event is more for “Team America,” than “America haters.”

—Jonathan Mendick

wEEkLy PICkS

Love Horror Short Film Festival

Hello Kitty’s Supercute Friendship Festival

Friday, June 26 Four hours of horror mixed with burlesque, cosplay and makeup competitions might be the best way to close out June. Watch a dozen FILM short horror films including Jamie DeWolf’s music video for “Time is Crawling.” Stephen W. Martin’s Dead Hearts brings together biker werewolves and Kung Fu, while Brendan Butler’s Deep Red Dandelions tells the tale of Albert Fish and his gruesome act in 1928. $20, 8 p.m. at the Colonial Theatre, 3522 Stockton Boulevard; www.sachorrorfilmfest.com.

Friday, June 26, through Sunday, June 28 Remember last year when it was discovered that Hello Kitty is actually a little girl and not a kitty at all? (Or maybe an anthropomorphic cat?) The world is a crazy, crazy place. Indulge FESTIVAL your supercute self with Hello Kitty and friends for a weekend of live performances, photo ops, shopping and exhibits. $25-$185, various times at Sleep Train Arena, One Sports Parkway; www.sanrio.com/hkfestival.

—Trina L. Drotar

22 | SN&R | 06.25.15

—Deena Drewis

Taste Of Soul Saturday, June 27 This annual festival is here to whet your appetite for all things soul-, jazz- and R&B-related. There will be some ridiculously good barbecue fare, (probably) no hipsters, and any beards in the crowd might actually have been around since the early ’80s. On this varied bill are World Praise Choir, Pryncess Hall, Ke’Shay FESTIVAL Love, headliner The Legacy of The Temptations and more. Veterans will be honored as well at this well-rounded event. Free ($25 VIP tickets), 11 a.m. at Cesar Chavez Plaza, 910 I Street; (916) 477-0157.

—Eddie Jorgensen

Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 Red Shoe Crawl Saturday, June 27 The Sacramento Philharmonic & Opera’s 2015-2016 season opens with Andrew Grams conducting two powerful compositions: Ralph Vaughan Williams’ CLASSICAL contemporary, MUSIC five-movement “Concerto Grosso,” composed for a three-section string orchestra; and Gustav Mahler’s 19thcentury Symphony No. 2 (a.k.a. “Resurrection”), which is influenced by German folk poems and will guide you on a 90-minute symphonic and vocal journey. $13-$48, 8 p.m. at the Sacramento Community Center Theater, 1301 L Street; http://2intune.org.

—Trina L. Drotar

Sunday, June 28 It’s always fun to try new restaurants with friends, but how many different places can you sample in one night? Two? Three, maybe, if you starve yourself for two days. The Red Shoe Crawl is a chance for folks FOOD to sample bites from a whole bunch of restaurants in the region for one reasonable price—all while supporting Ronald McDonald House Charities. Restaurants include Capital Dime, LowBrau, Zocalo, Fahrenheit 250 BBQ, de Vere’s Irish Pub and many more. $60, 1 p.m. starting at the Sheraton Grand Hotel, 1230 J Street; www.rmhcnc.org.

—Aaron Carnes

IllustratIons by Hayley DosHay

Boatload of flavor ho Mok SeAfood, orchid thAi reStAurAnt & bAr It’s easy to get distracted by all of the fancy modern décor and glamor of 16 Powerhouse, but forget that: What’s the chow like? If you’re looking for Thai fishiness, a plate of Ho Mok Seafood ($16.50) is a great choice. Mussels, scallops, calamari and some real big shrimp with Thai curry and a boatload of vegetables and seasonings—it’s both complex and filling, plated in such a way that it’s easy to experience flavors individually or in different combinations. Just be sure to put aside another $1.50 for some rice, and you’re set to enjoy both the meal and the swanky new digs. 1609 16th Street, www.orchidthai916.com.

—Anthony Siino

Speak-easy boba Milk teA, VAMpire penguin Ordering boba milk tea at Vampire Penguin felt like how I imagine ordering whiskey would have been at a speakeasy during Prohibition. I couldn’t find any drinks on any menu, so I just walked up and asked, “Got any drinks?” Answer: Thai tea or milk tea. I chose the latter and then added boba (tapioca, pearls, whatever you want to call them) and lychee-flavored jelly. The boba could’ve been a little softer, but the lychee flavor in the jelly was great, and even spruced up the somewhat weak tea. Overall, it was a steal at just $3.75 (though the server may have forgotten to charge an extra 50 cents for the lychee jelly)—and I’m quite happy to have another place serving boba in the grid. 907 K Street, www.facebook.com/vampirepenguin916.

IllustratIon by Mark stIvers

Mindful partying by JAnelle bitker

Conscious clubbing: A nightclub without the booze? That’s the vision for Andy Fray, who is launching his events company Zero Point Zero with a substance-free party at the Elks Tower (921 11th Street) on Saturday, July 18. Instead of beer, dancers can guzzle cold-pressed juice and kombucha-based cocktails from Metro Kitchen & Drinkery and nibble on appetizers from Strings Urban Kitchen. Sober for four years, Fray wants a nightlife alternative for those in recovery. But he’s also finding there’s a lot of support for substance-free parties with the yogi and health-conscious communities, as well as women who want to dance without unwanted advances from drunk idiots. BEFORE

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JAnelleb@newSreView.coM

The first of the soon-to-be-monthly events will be 21-and-over, though. “We want this to feel like a nightclub event with a more adult crowd,” Fray said. In the future, though, Fray hopes to add some 18-and-up events and partner with more Sacramento eateries. Old kid on the block: Sacramento native moves to the Bay Area, rises to the top of the restaurant industry and decides now is the time to open something back in the ol’ hometown—it’s becoming a common story. Tom Schnetz runs several highprofile restaurants in Oakland—Dona Tomas, Flora and Xolo among them. He recently teamed up with two |

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childhood friends—all three grew up just blocks apart in Land Park— to launch the Cinders, a bar at 5340 Auburn Boulevard. It’s scheduled to officially open the week of July 6. The location has seen a slew of unsuccessful dive bars over the years, but it was best known as Embers, one of Sacramento’s first strip clubs. The Cinders pays homage to Embers only in name, and the presence of two large fireplaces. Those friends are Jeff Tochterman, a real estate agent who will oversee the day-to-day operations, and John Mikacich, who owns the property as well as the Limelight in East Sacramento. Schnetz still lives in Oakland, but he essentially conceptualized and designed the Cinders, according to Tochterman. All the walls and surfaces have changed. Half of the 12 beers on tap will belong to local breweries. Cocktails will be a big focus, with bartenders trained by the veterans at Flora in Oakland. But Flora’s cocktails typically cost $12, and the Cinders isn’t exactly in a hip Midtown location. Tochterman wants to keep drinks around $6. “Our idea is to use all the same techniques without having to increase the cost,” Tochterman said. Ω |

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—JonAthAn Mendick

So. Much. Squash. Zucchini It’s that time again—time to put zucchini in every dish you make! It’s just the beginning of the season, so try to pace yourself. Summer squash will be plentiful and cheap at the markets for several months, and wellmeaning neighbors will bring them by to share. So what to do with all that squash? Halve and grill them for an easy side. Shred them and toss in a hot pan with oil, garlic and sliced almonds. Make a quick pickle with vinegar and spices for zucchini-less winter days. The ultimate use, which even kids will eat, is chocolate-zucchini bread. It’s a veggie and a treat, all in one!

—Ann MArtin rolke |

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Tsukiji Sushi

Then there was the smelt. Can we talk about smelt and the curious case of why so few restaurants ever serve them? Yes, I suppose there’s the whole eating something 3539 bradshaw road, suite 3b; (916) 368-7718; that is technically looking back at you thing, http://tsukijisushi.com but carnivorous diners need to get over that or Dinner for one: $12 - $20 become vegetarians. These smelt were supple, Good for: Japanese food that isn’t sushi not too oily, and fried with the same crisp Notable dishes: nabeyaki ramen and fried smelt exterior as the tempura. Truly, someone back in this kitchen can fry. The tonkatsu, a breaded and fried pork cutlet was succulent inside and crunchy on the outside. The Tsukiji pattern emerged: Deepfried equals good. Minus rare exceptions, I generally assume The night’s biggest hit was the nabeyaki most sushi places are the same sushi place. ramen: a one-pot dish of chewy ramen In essence, they’re a bit like Taco Bell. The noodles, cooked chicken, shrimp and fish cake same eight ingredients matched in any number punctuated with a variety of crispy vegetables. of different ways to create a larger menu, but On top of it all was a fried egg with a stillinstead of sour cream and mystery beef, it’s wobbly yolk. Once broken, the yolk oozed spicy mayo and fake crab. into the sweet and hauntingly savory broth. It Are all of you as bored as I am by this? was all terribly addicting and something that Cheap cylinders of rice and nori packed with I will return for when the cold comes back to the same old, same old tired combinations? Sacramento. Rolls with silly names at all-day Now to the sushi rolls. To happy-hour prices so cheap be honest, there is little to any proper foodie should be say. Three different rolls, downright nervous? most of them rehashes of I went into Tsukiji masago, soft-shell crab, Sushi recently, a humble The Tsukiji spicy mayo, et cetera, place tucked behind a were ordered. Tonguepattern emerged: Starbucks on Bradshaw in-cheek names and Road that I left with Deep-fried curiously low prices. The terribly mixed feelings. 1822 roll was smeared Tsukiji does do a lot equals good. in a fire-engine-red hot of things right when it sauce that was nothing but comes to Japanese fare, pure cayenne, obliterating but it’s the sushi part of the the flavor of the tuna. menu where issues arise. The Fat “D” roll was akin to the Let’s begin with the non-sushi worst hookup ever: bland and boring. options. They’re not that varied, but We actually dissected this one: old avocado, what is available is flavorful and expertly mushy fish, poorly seasoned rice. Yawn. cooked. There was a deep-fried roll as well that A plate of gyoza stuffed with pork arrived tasted of the color beige. Done and done. perfectly crispy and so hot they belched steam None of the rolls were finished and we when bit into. My fellow diners dredged them refused to take any of it home. through soy sauce to quell their heat before Tsukiji Sushi is a conundrum: a terrible, devouring them in seconds. repetitious sushi joint but an excellent Tempura vegetables and shrimp were a Japanese fry and noodle house. Still, know paragon of what tempura should be: etherewhat to order and your visit will be worth the ally light with a perfectly crisp exterior that time and money. Ω shatters against your teeth. These were cooked

quick and served tongue-scalding hot. No soppy spots of oil or heaviness in the stomach that results from poor frying. Rather, these were snappy pieces of carrot, broccoli and sweet potato paired with tender shrimp.

Fish to fork Fishing is hard work. And it requires a lot of luck. Now you can take effort and probability out of the equation with Siren Fish Co. (www.sirenseasa.com). For the last four years, Sacramento’s Anna Larsen and her company have been connecting Northern California seafood lovers with fisherman in Bodega Bay and Fort Bragg, sending out a CSA-style seafood box to subscribers in several cities. The company just launched a new pickup location at Oak Park Brewing Company. If you’re looking to join but have questions, you can probably just go grab a beer there and chat with Larsen every Tuesday— she’s planning on making Tuesday-night happy-hour fish drop-offs a regular thing. Also, on Saturday, June 27, Larsen will teach a seafood sustainability and preparation class called Swish Swish Slow Fish through Slow Food Sacramento (http://slowfoodsacramento.com/event/ swish-swish-slow-fish/). Happening from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. in Curtis Park, the class costs $30 and includes lunch.

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by Shoka Using beans for sweets is nothing new: Think of all the gluten-free baked goods that use some kind of bean flour as their base, as well as Japanese red-bean-paste treats (the red-bean-filled mochi covered in sesame seeds at Oto’s Marketplace at 4990 Freeport Boulevard are great, although, those do taste a little beany). Find the easy and fast recipe at http://minimalist baker.com, and don’t spill the beans about the beans.

The most important ingredient in the Minimalist Baker’s vegan black bean brownies is deception. Because while they appear and taste as brownies should, disclosing that a can of black beans instead of flour is the main building block is likely to result in a shot of crazy eyes and furrowed brows directed at you, kind baker. Nonbeliever eaters will psychologically change the chocolate flavor into a bowl of chili before even biting into one, but the truth is, there is no bean taste detectable in these brownies.

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SACRAMENTO 3511 Truxel Rd Sacramento CA 95834 (916) 928-6100

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PAID ADVERTISEMENT Paul Cruz is executive director of the Mexican-American Addiction Program in Sacramento. PHOTO BY LOUISE MITCHELL

Considering Culture AVOID ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT ADDICTION

ddiction knows no cultural boundaries and no prejudice, according to recovery expert Paul Cruz. It is a disease that can afflict a wide variety of people, people who belong to every race, ethnicity, religion, age group and socioeconomic level. Yet, society’s preconceptions about the prevalence of addiction in certain groups aren’t always accurate. Cruz says groups that are often inappropriately believed to be more prone to substance abuse include African-Americans, low-income individuals and young adults. But in reality, people in treatment for addiction can be “anyone, in any profession, from any cultural or economic background,” he says. “I can’t tell you the number of soccer moms I’ve seen having to go

to methadone clinics for an opiate addiction they got after using a perfectly legal prescription,” Cruz says. While he believes strongly that a person’s cultural identification cannot act as a predictor for drug or alcohol abuse, Cruz, as executive director of the Mexican-American Addiction Program in Sacramento,

“Regardless of your background, let’s be honest about the fact that drug abuse is affecting us and let’s work to effect change.” Paul Cruz

says it is a key component to the treatment process. Culturally responsive treatment isn’t just limited to identifying a person’s ethnicity or religion. It’s crucial to understand individuals on all levels and to relate to them, Cruz says. In his experience, children are far more likely to become addicted to a substance when parents are users. But it’s a fallacy that this only exists among certain socioeconomic groups, he says. “You always hear people say, ‘People with jobs or kids can’t do drugs,’ but it’s just simply not true,” Cruz says. When it comes to their clients at MAAP, Cruz says one of the most impactful ways his counselors are able to help is by keeping an open mind and being honest with themselves about their own ability

CCAPP’s

to connect with a given client. Counselors have to be prepared to assess the needs of anyone who comes through their door, even if it means offering referrals to another counselor. “It’s key that you get a sense of how culturally entrenched a person is before you can treat addiction,” Cruz says. Cruz strongly believes that no matter where a person is coming from, his program can help anyone navigate a successful recovery. “Regardless of your background, let’s be honest about the fact that drug abuse is affecting us and let’s work to effect change,” he says. BY LEXI BRISTER

Sacramento News & Review and California Consortium of Addiction Programs and Professionals (CCAPP) have partnered to tell sponsored stories that share the joys of recovery, break down the barriers of stigma, and employ individuals, families and the community to form a united front against the disease of addiction. To find more about recovery and resources offered in the community, visit www. newsreview.com/sacramento/ ccapp.

Mexican American Addiction Program

Directory Some of Sacramento’s Drug & Alcohol Programs, Organizations, Recovery Centers, and Transitional Homes: MAAP Inc.

4241 Florin Road Sacramento, CA 95823 (916) 394-3489 www.maap.org

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Clean & Sober Transitional Living Inc 8938 Madison Ave Fair Oaks, CA 95628 (916) 961-8934 www.clean-and-sober-living.com

1446 Ethan Way Sacramento, CA 95825 (916) 922-5121 www.ncaddsac.org

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Gateway House

4343 Williamsbourgh Dr. Sacramento, CA 95823 (916) 395-3552 4441 Auburn Blvd Ste E Sacramento, CA 95841 (916) 473-5764 www.strategies4change.org

River City Recovery Center Inc. 500 22nd Street Sacramento, CA 95816 (916) 442-3979 www.rivercityrecovery.org

3647 40th Street Sacramento, CA 95817 (916) 397-2434 4049 Miller Way Sacramento, CA 95817 (916) 451-9312 www.gffw.org

Sacramento Recovery House

Med Aid

3100 Stockton Blvd Sacramento, CA 95817 (916) 736-3188

Harm Reduction Services 2800 Stockton Blvd Sacramento, CA 95817 (916) 456-4849 www.harmreduction.org

Sacramento County Dept of Health & Human Services Alcohol & Drug Services 3321 Power Inn Rd Ste120 Sacramento, CA 95826 (916) 874-9754 www.DHHS.saccounty.net

1914 22nd Street Sacramento, CA 95816 (916) 455-6258 www.sacramentorecoveryhouse.org

For more information about these companies please look on our website: www.newsreview.com/sacramento/CCAPP.us 26

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Problems and solutions eveRy Last WoRd Everybody thinks they know all about the popular girls, but Samantha, who seems to fit in so well with the Crazy Eights, her clique of too-cool BFFs, has a secret that would destroy her social status. In Every Book Last Word (Disney-Hyperion, $17.99) a new young adult novel from Tamara Ireland Stone, Samantha is coping with obsessivecompulsive disorder. And it’s not pretty. The stress, both of her illness and of hiding it from everyone, is tearing her apart. Then she meets Caroline, who introduces her to the Poet’s Corner, a secret group of students with a creative bent. She wants to belong— more, she needs to belong—but there are obstacles. Oh, and romance, of course, because it’s a book for teens. But the real key here is that this particular teenage “problem novel” is focused on the solution; it’s an accurate and complete characterization of a young woman who is living with a mental illness, not suffering from it. The distinction is important. —Kel Munger

Not just hyperbole the Best shoW It takes a lot of chutzpah to name your podcast The Best Show, but host Tom Scharpling’s weekly offering never fails to satisfy. PoDCASt Whether the former Saturday Night Live producer is making jabs at Ringo Starr, taking calls from loveable degenerates or sparring with a rogue gallery that includes characters such as “Philly Boy Roy” (all played by comedy partner Jon Wurster) Scharpling’s three-hour romp is a weekly fix of guaranteed laughs. The show airs every Tuesday at 6 p.m. and can be downloaded as a podcast every Wednesday morning. http://thebestshow.net/podcast. —Jaime Carrillo

Cup of awesome PachaMaMa’s MidtoWn RoasteRy Launch PaRty Sacramento continues to make good on its vow to be the best in the farm-to-table/fork/cup game with the launch of the Pachamama Coffee Coffee Cooperative of Small-Scale Coffee Producers roasting headquarters in Midtown. The co-op, comprised of family-owned farms outside the U.S., celebrates with a full day of classes on farming, roasting and home-brewing, topped off with free tacos and beer. 11 a.m.-midnight, Saturday, June 27; free. 919 20th Street, www.pacha.coop.

THINK FREE.

FIND OF THE WEEK

Ryan MoRRis gReeting caRds When it comes to making puns, Sacramento native Ryan Morris wants you to know that he doesn’t “carrot all,” to borrow a phrase from one of his pen-and-ink greeting cards available for sale in his Etsy shop (www.etsy.com/ shop/ryanmorrisart, $3.50 each). While there are some practical Art offerings—the “let’s get hammered” card is a lovely alternative to a bland congratulations, and a drawing of a meat thermometer with the words “you’re hot” is charming in a blunt way—the weirder ones are even more fun. It’s unclear what occasion would call for a “trust tieself” card with a drawing of a necktie, or if there’s someone out there that would actually end a relationship with a card that says “cassette me free,” but these peculiar offerings inspire the imagination. For instance, say your former rival from your AP English class back in high school gets an anonymous card out of the blue that says “You won’t ever write that novel.” How fun is that?! Beyond the wordplay, Morris dabbles in whimsical mixed-media pieces (a collage of a giant scuba diver’s head surfacing in a wooded lake, an embroidered doily that says “My Anaconda Don’t”) as well as more straightforward photography, like long-exposure shots of Sacramento spots such as A & P Liquors and Lumens Light + Living at night, and eerie blackand-white shots at a carnival. More can be found on his website at http://ryanmorrisart.word press.com. —Deena Drewis

joIN ouR

team SN&R IS LookINg FoR AN AdveRtISINg CoNSuLtANt Do you love Sacramento? Do you want to help local businesses succeed? So do we! The SN&R is looking for individuals who care about building relationships and partnering with local businesses. If you have the heart, we have the tools to train you to be a successful Ad Consultant. Check out our full job posting at www.newsreview.com/sacramento/jobs and apply today! FoR moRe INFoRmAtIoN, vISIt www.NewSRevIew.Com/SACRAmeNto/jobS

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++++

A MASTERPIECE!

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– Mara Reinstein,

“ONE OF THE YEAR’S BEST FILMS. Funny, hip, touching and UTTERLY IRRESISTIBLE.” – Lou Lumenick,

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SN&R | 06.25.15 SACRAMENTO NEWS & REVIEW THURSDAY 06/25

ROSEVILLE SACRAMENTO Century Roseville 14 & XD The Tower Theatre (916) 797-3466 (916) 442-0985

Shakespeare in Sactown (and beyond)

Chemical Imbalance: A Jekyll and Hyde Play

This freewheeling, frequently physical farce retells this Victorian fable through a satirical lens. As in R.L. Stevenson’s original, the respectable Dr. Jekyll actually enjoys becoming the brutish, violent Mr. Hyde when he swigs his mysterious elixir, releasing inhibitions. F, Sa 8pm. Through 7/18. $12-$17.50. Kennedy Mine Amphitheatre, 1105 N. Main St. in Jackson; www.mstw.org. J.H.

The summer Shakespeare season gets underway, with festivals close to home and further afield The Davis Shakespeare Festival (www.shakespeare davis.org) runs June 25 through August 2, with two shows in repertory: the durable by Jeff Hudson Shakespeare comedy Twelfth Night (in this case set in southern Italy around 1950), and the 1985 musical The Mystery of Edwin Drood, based on the novel that Charles Dickens left unfinished when he died. Since Dickens did not provide an ending, the audience will get to vote nightly and pick one of several endings. The cast includes two professional actors (Matt K. Miller and Matt Edwards) and others with conservatory training. Both shows involve a bit of gender-bending, with the leading actress in a “pants role,” passing herself off as a man in order to advance her cause.

Land Park, located at 3800 South Land Park Drive. Romeo and Juliet plays July 3, 5, 12, 17, 19, 25, 30 and August 1. As You Like It plays July 10, 11, 16, 18, 24, 26, 31 and August 2. Performances start at 8 p.m. on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays; and 6 p.m. on Sundays. Gates open early for picnics. Seating is unreserved, so arrive early for the best spots. Bring insect repellant and a sweater (the venue cools after 9 p.m.) Tickets are $15-$18.

The Explorers Club

Playwright Nell Benjamin’s farce is the kind of madcap comedy that B Street Theatre does better than anyone else. Buck Busfield directs an extremely talented ensemble cast in the broad comedy about an 1870s London men’s club of adventurers that is thrown into a tizzy when a woman is proposed for membership. Tu 6:30 pm; W 2pm & 6:30pm;

Th, F, 8pm; Sa 5pm & 9pm; Su 2 pm. Through 7/26. $23-$35. B Street

The Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival

(www.laketahoeshakespeare.com) runs July 10 through August 23. Romeo and Juliet will alternate with The Fantasticks, a small musical that ran in New York for more than 17,000 performances. Tahoe Shakespeare typically features about 10 professional actors. Both shows deal with rebellious teenagers from opposing families; they fall in love with each other (which is not what their domineering parents had planned). It all happens outdoors in a lakeside amphitheater at Sand Harbor in Lake Tahoe Nevada State Park, 2005 Nevada Highway 28. Performances are 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays. Tickets cost $15-$89, with two-show plans available.

Theatre, 2711 B St.; (916) 443-5300; www.bstreettheatre.org. J.C.

Photo courtesy of Davis shakesPeare festival

Performances are indoors at the Veterans Memorial Theatre, 203 West 14th Street in Davis. Performances are 8 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays, 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. on Saturdays (where you can see both productions on the same day), and 2 p.m. on Sundays. Tickets cost $15-$25 per show or $25-$45 for a twoshow pass. The Sacramento Shakespeare Festival

(www.sacramentoshakespeare.net) runs July 3 through August 2, with two shows in repertory. As You Like It is a pastoral comedy featuring the plucky Rosalind (who passes herself off as a young man). Romeo and Juliet (as everyone knows) is a tragedy about teenage lovers. The shows feature community actors from the Sacramento area. Romeo and Juliet will be staged with an all-male cast (as was done in Shakespeare’s time) and Elizabethan costumes. On the other hand, As You Like It will have an all-female cast, and will be set in Atlantic City. Performances are outdoors in the William Carroll Amphitheatre in Sacramento’s William BEFORE

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Pajama-clad writer-actor Richard Winters pummels the pillows and paces apprehensively in this solo show about a guy shaken up by divorce, online dating and lingering masculine hang-ups. It’s a portrait of the middle-aged artist as unexpectedly single man. F 8pm, Su 2pm. Through 7/5. $15-$20. Wilkerson Theatre in the R25 Arts Complex, 1725 25th St; (916) 451-5822; www.calstage.org. J.H.

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5 suBliMe–DoN’t Miss

There’s long been a fascination of human beings melding with technology, from Frankenstein to Blade Runner to the more recent Her. The challenge always seems to come by down to the philosophical quandary of what constitutes Patti Roberts the essence of being human. These science-fiction stories center around the fact that you can insert data and knowledge into a human-like receptacle, but duplicating human response, emotion and humanity is the ultimate challenge. And that’s at the heart of Thomas Gibbons’ Uncanny Valley, which is Capital Stage’s 10th-season closer and the last to be directed by departing Artistic Director Jonathan Williams. Neuroscientist Claire (Jessica Powell) is retiring and her last project is a big one: augmenting the consciousness, data and memories that have been downloaded into the robotic duplication of a dying multimillionaire Julian (Michael Wiles) whose plan is to stay alive through his mechanical man-made twin. Uncanny Valley is staged so that we witness the physical creation of Julian—first as a head, then as his limbs are added and the “human” slowly emerges, an acting challenge that Wiles nails. Equally strong is Powell’s depiction of Claire, whose main job is to teach expressions, gestures, feelings, actions, reactions and maybe a conscience to a static robot, while trying not to get emotionally involved in the man she’s helping to create. Of course, besides the technical and ethical issues, we get subplots that move the story along including Julian and Claire’s back stories as well as their current personal challenges and dilemmas. There are some frustrations with the play—most notably a plot line regarding Claire’ mysterious daughter, where a resolution seems to be promised throughout, but never comes to fruition. However, we do get enough fascinating and absorbing issues overall to provide much fodder for after-theater discussions and debates. Ω AFTER | 06.25.15 | SN&R | 29

shakespeare.org), a professional festival, runs June 30 through August 30, with Macbeth and Much Ado about Nothing. Performances are outdoors in a redwood glen on the UC Santa Cruz campus, 1156 High Street in Santa Cruz. Single tickets are $40-$52 with discounts for seniors, students and subscribers. For those looking for an epic road trip, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (www.osfashland.org),

the granddaddy of them all, continues through November 1 in Ashland. There are 11 shows this year, including Much Ado About Nothing, Pericles and Antony and Cleopatra. Head to the festival’s website for tickets, showtimes and more information. Ω A RT S & C U LT U R E

Sleeping in the Middle of the Bed

Uncanny Valley

Santa Cruz Shakespeare (www.santacruz

Sometimes, really strong performances make up for a weak play. That’s what happens with Celebration Arts’ production of Levee James, by playwright S.M. Shephard-Massat. The two main actors—Alexandra Barthel (seen at Folsom’s Falcon’s Eye Theatre and Capital Stage) and James R. Ellison III (Celebration Arts)—elevate a muddled storyline. Th, F, Sa 8pm; Su 2pm. Through 6/18. $8-$15. Celebration Arts, 4469 D St.; (916) 455-2787; www.celebrationarts.net. P.R.

Robot drama

(www.calshakes.org), a professional Bay Area company, stages Life is a Dream (a Spanish classic) from July 8 through August 2, The Mystery of Irma Vep from August 12 through September 6, and King Lear from September 16 through October 11. Performances are outdoors in the often-foggy Bruns Memorial Amphitheatre, 100 California Shakespeare Theater Way in Orinda—so take a jacket. Ticket prices and performance times vary.

STORY

Levee James

short reviews by Jim carnes, Jeff hudson and Patti roberts.

California Shakespeare Theatre

Kristi Webb (left) as Viola and Ian Hopps as Feste in Davis Shakespeare Festival’s production of Twelfth Night.

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A twee hell Me and Earl and the Dying Girl The Sundance Film Festival is a respected institution, a vital showcase and support system for independent and world cinema that has been by Daniel Barnes operating for nearly four decades. However, a certain type of incredibly annoying American independent film has become synonymous with the festival over the years (i.e., quirky, manic-depressive, masturbatory, shallow and false “the summer I grew up” dramedies), to the point that the term “Sundance movie” is almost always used in a pejorative manner.

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Me and Earl and the greasy food.

1 Poor

2 Fair

3 Good

4 Very Good

5 W W W. N E W S R E V I E W.C O M 30 | SN&R | 06.25.15

excellent

Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s oxygen-deprived Me and Earl and the Dying Girl won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and while it’s relatively weightless and apolitical, the double win was inevitable. This is just about the Sundance-iest Sundance movie that Sundance ever Sundanced, so aggressively quirky and needy and contrived that it makes The Spitfire Grill look like A Woman Under the Influence. Every line, gesture, story beat and camera move might as well have air quotes around it, and yet Gomez-Rejon also insists on plying us with insipid life lessons. It’s like Juno on crystal meth. “I have no idea how to tell this story,” says Greg (the “me” of “me and Earl”) to open the film, and from there Gomez-Rejon and screenwriter Jesse Andrews (adapting his own novel) unload a nonstop barrage of cutesy narration, winking intertitles (“Day 1 of Doomed Friendship”), stop-motion animation, 360-degree pans and overall in-your-face whimsy. If you’re on the film’s twee wavelength, you’ll probably slurp it down like a tureen of psychedelic soup, but I didn’t buy Gomez-Rejon’s sales pitch for a second, and so it felt like I was being harassed by a pandering emotional panhandler for 105 minutes. RJ Cyler plays Earl and Olivia Cooke plays the dying girl (a.k.a. Rachel), but despite the fact that both of them seem to possess real problems (e.g., poverty, alcoholism, animal abuse, dying),

they are utterly journey-less and disposable characters. They possess no inner lives or agency, and only exist to assist Greg (Thomas Mann), a glib, unambitious, self-loathing high-school senior who maintains a “carefully cultivated invisibility,” in realizing his true potential. How many girls are going to have to die before this post-ironic slacker becomes slightly less of a complete jag-off? As the film begins, Greg is cruising through high school under the radar, belonging to every social clique by belonging to none and avoiding the lunchtime minefield of the cafeteria by watching old movies with his childhood friend Earl. Greg’s bubble of emotional passivity is punctured when his overbearing mother forces him to befriend and console his classmate Rachel, who was recently diagnosed with leukemia. Against his will, Greg finds himself forming a bond with Rachel, although she seems far more interested in fixing and healing this sarcastic shoegazer than in her own fading mortality (in true movie-disease fashion, Rachel only grows more radiantly beautiful the closer she creeps toward the grave). Most films are designed to reinforce established gender and racial hierarchies (the Jurassic Park franchise alone, my God!), and in Me and Earl, death and disease are just rungs in the ladder of white male privilege. Leukemia schmeukemia, you guys, we need to save niceguy Greg’s sagging self-esteem! Throughout the film, Greg interprets the benign pleasantness of cute girl Madison (Katherine C. Hughes) as a threat, finally decrying the desexualized politeness of all perky-breasted females as “an act of cruelty.” Any worries that I was mistakenly attributing the protagonist’s shallowness to the movie itself were erased by this scene, which is treated as a fist-pumping triumph.

It’s like Juno on crystal meth. Me and Earl lives under glass in a way that deliberately recalls the elaborately constructed dioramas of Wes Anderson, but Gomez-Rejon doesn’t create his own world, he just borrows from other people’s worlds. Greg and Earl have a long history of collaborating on deliberately bad movies, producing cheap, quasi-remakes of cinema classics (echoes of Max Fischer from Rushmore) with groan-pun titles like A Sockwork Orange and The Rad Shoes. Gomez-Rejon tries to do the same thing here, but he fails to fuse his references into something organic and original, which is why Me and Earl ultimately feels like footnotes in search of a text. Ω

by daniel barnes & JiM lane

Aloft

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A reclusive falconer living near the Arctic Circle (Cillian Murphy) tags along with a journalist (Mélanie Laurent) when she goes to interview his mother (Jennifer Connelly), an artist and faith healer from whom he’s been estranged for 20 years. Falconers and faith healers at the Arctic Circle? Who writes this crap? Answer: Claudia Llosa, the Peruvian auteur (of two features, two TV episodes and this) who got hot when her The Milk of Sorrow was nominated for a foreign language Oscar in 2009. This is her first venture in English, and let’s not mince words: it’s turgid, inert, pretentious claptrap, so incoherent that you’ll learn more from the studio’s synopsis on IMDb than from actually seeing it. Llosa jumbles time and has her actors speak in unintelligible mumbles—which, come to think of it, is no loss. J.L.

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least half a dozen times, but only because of the punishingly loud soundtrack spikes that accompany every jump-scare. The terror that will truly stick with me is Dermot Mulroney’s “How-did-I-get-here?” performance as the girl’s father. D.B.

When it debuted on HBO in 2004, Entourage the series provided an irresistible, cameo-filled glimpse inside the petty hedonism of young Hollywood, but there was also a much-needed sense of self-mockery. Very quickly, though, that formula curdled and fossilized, and suddenly we were supposed to find these loathsome douchebags likeable and relatable, people to actively root for rather than merely accept. Entourage the movie also mistakenly believes that we’re emotionally invested in seeing young actor Vincent Chase and his loyal buddies fall ass-backward into their Hollywood dreams. Maybe that’s why there doesn’t appear to have been any attempt to make a unique or compelling (or even funny) film. It feels like four episodes of the show were lazily assembled into a feature-length afterparty, but spending more than a half hour at a time with these characters only makes them more nauseating. Entourage isn’t a binge watch, it’s a purge watch. D.B.

An elderly widow (Blythe Danner) sees her comfortable single life expand in surprising ways when she strikes up an unlikely friendship with her young pool cleaner (Martin Starr) and a romance with a new neighbor (Sam Elliott). Director Brett Haley and co-writer Marc Basch give this easygoing dramedy an air of knowing it’s their ticket to the big time, and they seem determined not to blow it; the movie is sweet and carefully made. Best of all, they give a well-earned showcase to Danner; after 40-plus years of being one of the unsung treasures of the American acting profession, she finally has a movie almost all to herself. She’s in just about every shot, and she infuses the whole film with her ageless, downto-earth beauty. Rhea Perlman, June Squibb and Mary Kay Place add spice as Danner’s best friends. J.L.

Love & Mercy

Bill Pohlad’s biopic about Brian Wilson takes a fairly bold approach, concurrently telling two stories of the Beach Boy’s troubled genius in two different eras, covering both his 1960s meltdown and his 1980s recovery. It’s especially bold in that the two actors playing Wilson—Paul Dano in his youth and John Cusack in middle age—look absolutely nothing like each other, and yet they mesh seamlessly, like two instruments playing in different keys making an unexpectedly beautiful sound. Dano’s entire career of affected oddballs now feels like a mere warmup to playing the socially awkward young Wilson, and the scenes of Wilson crafting Pet Sounds, creating a masterpiece out of the sound collage of his subconscious, are utterly riveting. The 1980s scenes aren’t quite as successful, but Cusack perfectly captures the ghostly sincerity of Wilson from that era, and there are fine supporting turns from Paul Giamatti and Elizabeth Banks. D.B.

Insidious: Chapter 3

Despite its title, Insidious: Chapter 3 actually takes place before the events of the first two Insidious films, but rest assured that this horror prequel is a cheap rip-off all the same. Insidious screenwriter Leigh Whannell makes his directorial debut, basically telling the origin story of Lin Shaye’s psychic medium supporting character, thus answering a number of questions that no one in the audience ever cared to ask. When a teenage girl (Stefanie Scott, a budding star if she ever escapes this sort of dreck) attempts to contact her dead mother, she awakens a malevolent spirit that traps her soul between the mortal world and an undead kingdom called The Further. I leapt out of my chair at

NEWS

Jurassic World

The idea that one’s brain must be switched into sleep mode in order to appreciate a film is silly and offensive, but that shouldn’t prevent a fully switched-on brain from enjoying a deeply stupid movie like Jurassic World. Director and co-writer Colin Trevorrow injects the moribund Jurassic Park franchise with new life by pairing the usual dinosaurs-running-amok formula with a seductive, Westworld-style story hook. In a canonically respectful present, John Hammond’s dream of a dinosaur-themed amusement park has come to fruition, with thousands of thrill-seeking families streaming through the Isla Nublar gates every day. Unfortunately, corporations are inherently evil (this message brought to you by Coca-Cola, Verizon, Samsung, Brookstone and Mercedes-Benz), and soon enough the park’s newest, genetically enhanced “attraction” gets loose and starts— wouldn’t you know it?—running amok. Jurassic World offers one-dimensional characters, misused actors, nonsensical motivations, retrograde gender politics, insipid pseudo-science and a whole lot of fun. D.B.

I’ll See You in My Dreams

Inside Out

Inside an 11-year-old girl’s head, conflicting yet complementary emotions of Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Bill Hader) and Disgust (Mindy Kaling) vie for control of “headquarters” when the girl’s family moves from Minnesota to San Francisco. The crisis and the conflict threaten to unravel the delicate balance of the girl’s personality, and how the emotions learn to adapt and work together form the core of the script by Meg LeFauve, Josh Cooley, and co-directors Pete Docter and Ronnie Del Carmen. The result is joyously funny, as good as anything Pixar Studios has ever done. It explores subtle psychological concepts, playing with the limits of what children can absorb and, in the process, giving them—and adults—an insight into what makes them tick. J.L.

Entourage

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“LOVELY.” - Bilge Ebiri, NEW YORK MAGAZINE

- Rex Reed, NEW YORK OBSERVER

After a police raid on an underground party, an African-American high school dweeb (Shameik Moore) finds himself in possession of a pistol and a fortune in Ecstasy— and in the cross hairs of the gangsters who want it back. Writer-director Rick Famuyiwa’s film is certainly unique—by turns, gritty, funny, harrowing, suspenseful and unpredictable. It’s a bit too loose-limbed and several minutes longer than it needs to be, but on balance it’s an enjoyable mashup of genres—a sort of John Hughes-meets-Spike-Lee. Moore is a real discovery and, with luck, could become a major star; he gets able support from Tony Revolori and Kiersey Clemons as his geek pals, A$ap Rocky as a friendly drug dealer and Zoë Kravitz as a young lady in the ’hood whom the dealer sends to Moore, Myles Standish-style, to court on his behalf. J.L.

“DEEPLY SATISFYING.” - John DeFore, HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

apocalyptic world. Here our antihero teams up cautiously with a female warrior (Charlize Theron) as the two seek to escape from a savage warlord (Hugh Keays-Byrne), taking the tyrant’s five wives with them to freedom. The script by Brendan McCarthy, Nico Lathouris and director George Miller wastes little time on subtlety—or dialogue, for that matter; its few words are often mumbled or bellowed into unintelligibility. But it hardly matters; the movie is one long-running battle scene expertly staged and paced by Miller, with a judicious use of CGI that doesn’t insult us with the blatantly impossible. All we really need to know is who the good guys are, and Miller gives us that. J.L.

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Max

A Texas teenager (Josh Wiggins) and his parents (Thomas Haden Church, Lauren Graham) adopt the traumatized service dog of the family’s oldest son, a marine who’s been killed in Afghanistan (Robbie Amell). The boy senses that somehow, his brother’s supposed best friend (Luke Kleintank) is at the root of the dog’s trauma. The script by Sheldon Lettich and director Boaz Yakin doesn’t exactly hold water—it hinges on weapon-running but doesn’t explain how the weapons got from Afghanistan to Texas—and Yakin gets amateurish performances from some of the supporting cast (e.g., Dejon LaQuake as Wiggins’ best friend). Still, if you’re a sucker for a-boy-andhis-dog movies (and who isn’t?), this one is a passable enough example of the genre—though it’ll hardly make you forget Lassie Come Home or Old Yeller. J.L.

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Spy

A CIA desk-jockey (Melissa McCarthy) goes into the field to infiltrate a nuclear arms deal—and avenge the death of the agent who was her secret crush (Jude Law). Writerdirector Paul Feig, who guided McCarthy to an Oscar nomination for Bridesmaids, does her an even bigger favor here: He’s given her the movie and the role for which she’ll be remembered. The result is both a riotous spoof that grows funnier by the minute and a stylish example of the genre it’s spoofing, with a clever plot full of twists and surprises—for example, a hilarious turn by Jason Statham (who knew he had such a flair for comedy?) sending up his ultra-macho persona. Rose Byrne, Miranda Hart, Bobby Cannavale and Allison Janney round out a swell supporting cast. Sequels are inevitable—and if they’re this good, they’ll be welcome. J.L.

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Behind the mask White Knuckle Riot unveils plans for heavy metal domination

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Anyone who’s attended a show in last year probably noticed that the attention spans of both band members and attendees is practically nonexistent. by Eddie Jorgensen Most bands seem to want the coveted middle slot and nobody wants to open or headline the show. Overall, musical solidarity is getting harder to find in the local scene.

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Learn more about White Knuckle Riot at www.facebook.com/ WhiteKnuckleRiot.

SAT. JUNE 27 | 6PM

2019 O ST | 916.442.2682 32 | SN&R | 06.25.15

The members of Sacramento’s heavy metal squad White Knuckle Riot, however, have made great strides to unite those in the city’s different metal genres and get their band seen and heard in the process. Rather than just playing the same clubs repeatedly, this band has its sights set on bigger things, including an upcoming tour with with fellow locals FallRise and the Alpha Complex. The band, which plays in masks that obscure its members’ faces, features Johnny Schizo ECV (vocals, guitar) and Misfire ECV (bass), Cory “Durus Cora” ECV (guitar), Robbie Fingers ECV (guitar), and Brian “Beatdown” Kelly (drums). Yes, those are stage names, and, yes, the ECV stands for E Clampus Vitus, a largely secret society devoted to the history of the American West and, in particular, the longforgotten miners. History aside, the band’s members say they’re looking forward to the upcoming run of shows on their Insane By Daylight tour, in no small part because of the people they’ll be working with, including a member of the iconic metal band Motograter. “We joined up with Mike Woodruff from Tattered Wings Booking Agency and they are now booking our shows,” Schizo says. “Mike also played in Motograter and is now in the Alpha Complex.” The tour will give all bands equal billing, he adds. “On this run, we’re simply going to switch off headlining slots in each town. … Everybody’s really cool to work with,” Schizo

says. “We know there won’t be any big egos since we’re all working for the same thing: to be seen and heard by more and more people.” In addition to the shows, White Knuckle Riot also just released a new EP, Lullabies to Murder By; the collection is one of the band’s best yet, Schizo says. “It includes four of our strongest songs to date,” Schizo says of the release, which is currently streaming online and will be available at shows for $5. Songs like “Rise Up & Remain” and “Opposition” are anything but typical suburban metal fare. Fans of early Cro-Mags, Agnostic Front’s older anthemic metal and punk, and even current metal fare à la Five Finger Death Punch, Lamb Of God or Testament, will love the immediacy of the background gang-style vocals and shredding guitar riffs on both jams. “We’re providing a voice for the youth and those who can’t speak up by simply standing up for our beliefs and convictions,” Schizo says of the music. “There’s so much bullshit in the news these days and the things we’re allowed to see on mainstream media are so screwed up and mostly one-sided. I do a lot of research on YouTube [for lyrical content] … and I definitely think our government is doing some sneaky shit as well.” Conspiracy theories aside, the band’s members collectively share more than 15 years of experience playing and their median age hovers around 37. That said, White Knuckle Riot has only existed since 2013. In the short time since they formed, however, they’ve earned headlining status at shows and a legion of fans who flock to see their onstage schtick. Those quick to misconstrue the band’s onstage garb and band name should note that these five guys are anything but thugs.

“ We’re all working for the same thing: to be seen and heard by more and more people.” Johnny Schizo singer-guitarist, White Knuckle Riot “We wear bandannas over our faces only for the first couple of songs for effect,” Schizo said. And, behind the masks, they really are a bunch of decent fellows, Schizo insists with a laugh. “We haven’t really had any fights at our shows sans a couple of ones involving our girlfriends.” Ω

Oddly enough: Los Angeles hip-hop collective Odd Future is best known for a few top acts— Tyler, the Creator, Frank Ocean, Earl Sweatshirt—but its Harlow’s tour stop last Tuesday actually featured some artists not even signed to Odd Future Records. Still, it was a pretty fun show. The crowd was young, energetic, mostly white and excited to be at an all ages hip-hop show. This being Odd Future, I had thought there would be more costumes. I didn’t see one horse head, although one guy was dressed like Hunter S. Thompson. The crowd seemed to know most of the words to most of the songs, and they all stood at the front of the stage—it was a small group, probably because the Golden State Warriors were in the process of winning the NBA championship at the same time—and danced like teenagers in the summertime. Pyramid Vritra’s laid-back, slightly off-kilter and very introspective flow had me nodding, and I do like these modern-ass, psychedelictype beats the kids are using these days. They make me feel like I am on drugs even when I am not on drugs.

Mike G. and Left Brain were cool, although I would have dug them a little more if their music tracks had been better prepared. Here’s a tip for all you aspiring rappers:

take the lead vocals off of your performance tracks! No one wants to hear you rapping along to your CD—it might as well be karaoke at that point. Bizarre (of Eminem’s old group D-12) brought solid energy and closed out with a brazen, manboobed, bare-chested romp through the almost classic song, “Purple Pills.” Although I would have liked to see a local act or two on the bill—SpaceWalker and her loopy party beats would have fit right in—this show was pretty good. Yet again Sacramento managed to have a hip-hop show without any problems or violence or nothing. How about that? Shout out to Harlow’s and Abstract Entertainment for continuing to support live hip-hop and to all the young white kids who know all the words. —Ngaio Bealum

as k 420 @ne w s re v i e w . c o m

—Janelle Bitker

jane lleb@ n ew s r ev i ew . com

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YOU’RE WELCOME, NATURE.

Punk sisters: Lucy Giles’ 17th birthday coincided with her band’s record release party—a night to beat prom by a long shot. But instead of Dog Party fans delivering a celebratory cake to the stage—come on, fans!—it’s Lucy who actually provided chocolate cupcakes for the people. Pink frosting to match her pink hair, of course. It was a Monday night, but the local sister duo of Lucy and Gwen still drew about 100 people to Harlow’s. The evening started out with a zippy set from Little Tents, a new-ish indie punk band with screamo elements. Pookie & The Poodlez, a classic Burger Records band, followed with low-fi garage punk encapsulated into one-minute, grimy pop songs. The hand-drawn backdrop of a puppy with a Slurpee sealed the deal. But the show belonged to Dog Party—it’s what finally got everyone out of their damn seats, after all. The indie punk sisters were celebrating the release of their fourth album, Vol. 4, which is now out on cassette via Burger Records and on CD and vinyl via Asian Man Records. Produced by Chris Woodhouse (Thee Oh Sees, Ty Segall), Vol. 4 sounds tight and polished, with 13 sassy, pop-punk tracks sure to please fans of 2013’s Lost Control. Live, Lucy is a fireball to watch. Her wide, eyeliner-painted eyes compete with her cadence for toptier expressiveness. She screams, squawks, squeals and laughs while she sings and drums. On guitar, Gwen provides structure. Duh, they work well together—they’ve been in the band for eight years. As such, they’ve built a fanbase familiar with their work, and their set spanned their long music career. ”Peanut Butter Dream” and “Dead Guy” were two new, catchy songs performed with electric energy. “I Can’t Believe That You’re Real,” an Agent Ribbons cover, was another highlight from Vol. 4. But the crowd really got going when Gwen asked for requests—and she got more than she bargained for, as the set expanded to include one and then three and then six additional songs. One of those additions was “The World Is Not A Game,” which Lucy said she wrote in the friggin’ fifth grade “because some kids were being mean.”

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Sister acts and oddfellows rap

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AFTER

| 06.25.15

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25THURS

26FRI

27SAT

Jonathan Richman

The Devil’s Train

Big Trouble

Potluck

Harlow’s Restaurant & Nightclub, 7 p.m., $15-$18

Starlite Lounge, 8 p.m., $8

Founder of the highly influential ’70s garage-rock band the Modern Lovers, singer-songwriter and guitarist Jonathan PUNK Richman has released dozens of records in his long career. With 30-plus years logged in the music industry, Richman worked as either a solo artist, or with other lo-fi musicians like John Cale of the Velvet Underground and David Robinson of the Cars. His song “Roadrunner” is known to be heavily influenced by the Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray” and was covered by punk legends like Joan Jett (the Runaways) and Johnny Rotten (the Sex Pistols). Richman will be joined by longtime drummer Tommy Larkin. 2708 J Street, http://jojofiles.blogspot.com.

Louie’s Cocktail Lounge, 9 p.m., $5

Chuga chuga chuga chuga choo choo! All aboard The Devil’s Train. First stop on this musical adventure: hell. This Grass Valley punk quartet formed in 2009, but had a recent train conductor change: Kerry Wright took over vocal duties for the group after Akasha Hepcat left earlier this year. Since then, the band has opened for Nekromantix, with previous opening stints including the Misfits. Despite the lineup change, the selfdescribed “jazz punks from hell” continue on—upright string bass and all. Forget the PUNK/JAZZ highway, the real path to hell is on tracks. The Moans open, with Rhythm Dragons headlining. 1517 21st Street, www.facebook.com/ thedevilstrainofficial.

—Steph Rodriguez

The Boardwalk, 7 p.m., $16

Big Trouble is a local band with a big country sound. Some classic guitar riffs pepper its songs for a bit of Credence Clearwater Revival-esque spice. The quartet has tight vocals harmonies—all of the band members sing—behind lead singer Alyssa Audrey’s voice. Gary Blodgett takes on the lead guitar and fiddle, Dan Cribb COUNTRY takes charge with strong bass lines and Todd Lewis drives the whole machine on drums. Big Trouble has rocked Concerts in the Park in Caesar Chavez Plaza, and will play Louie’s on June 26. Bring your pool cue, grab a beer and two-step on the dance floor. 3030 Mather Field Road in Rancho Cordova, www.bigtroublemusic.com.

—Meg Masterson

—Willie Clark

It’s going to be hard for security to enforce “no smoking” at a Potluck show. After all, the majority of the hip-hop duo’s catalog is about harvesting and inhaling large sums of cannabis. The group comes from Humboldt County and features Joshua R. Leiderman (a.k.a. Underrated) and HIP-HOP James Nnaemeka Kerri (a.k.a. 1 Ton). After several successful albums on the Suburban Noize label (run by members of Kottonmouth Kings), Potluck quickly rose to headlining status. Coincidentally, it has a new record appropriately titled #StonerProblems. Can’t guess what this one’s about, can you? Also on the bill are J Terrible, No Genre, Modern Day Profits and the Legion of D.O.O.M. 9426 Greenback Lane in Orangevale, www.facebook.com/potluck.music.

—Eddie Jorgensen

2708 J Street Sacramento, CA 916.441.4693 www.harlows.com COMING SOON

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Andy Allo

Erica Ambrin

Brave Season

Pamela Jean

Harlow’s Restaurant & Nightclub, 9 p.m., $20-$25 R&B and pop singer Andy Allo might have cut her teeth in the New Power Generation (y’know, the backing band for that Prince guy), but Sacramento was hip to her way before that: Allo moved from Cameroon at age 11 and eventually played her first solo gig at Fox & Goose in 2008. Allo’s most recent EP, Hello, released in April of this year, is a drastic shift from earlier material that evoked artists like Erykah Badu, Jill Scott and Raphael Saadiq and moves more toward straight dance-pop à la Ellie Goulding. All of which is to say, POP at 26, Allo is a tremendously promising and diverse Sacramento-raised artist to keep on your radar. 2708 J Street, http://alloevolution.com.

LowBrau, 6-10 p.m., free

Third Space Gallery, 8 p.m., $5

Sacramento rallied behind Erica Ambrin when she made it onto the latest season of American Idol. There were screenings at LowBrau and interviews on local SOUL television stations. Ambrin survived the auditions and went to Hollywood— the judges were impressed with her smooth, soulful voice—but she got cut shortly thereafter. The experience wasn’t for nothing, though. It motivated the singer-songwriter to complete her first EP, Suga, about her journey through love and life. And with a history of rapping, Ambrin brings some hip-hop vibes into her indie folk. Hear it at the EP release party, along with special guests Joe Kye, Spacewalker and Miss Marianna. 1050 20th Street, www.facebook.com/ericathesongbird.

—Deena Drewis

Blue Lamp, 8 p.m., $5-$7

In case you haven’t heard, emo is coming back in a big way. Well, maybe not that big, but there is a resurgence going on. Yuba City’s four-man outfit Brave Season is doing its part keeping indie-flavored emo (or is it emo-flavored indie?) alive on the emo-starved west coast. It’ll be performing for the first time since the release of the debut album, On Long Distance and The Ties That Held Us Together. Dynamic instruROCK mentals, catchy choruses and heart-rending lyrics are Brave Season’s forte. If you dig Modern Baseball or Into It Over It, Brave Season will be as warm and familiar as a Christmas sweater. 946 Olive Drive in Davis, www.facebook.com/ braveseason.

—Janelle Bitker

—Jaime Carrillo

Country singer Pamela Jean has been all over the country—and in true troubadour fashion has called a number of those different cities her home (San Diego; Wyoming, Minn.; etc.). Currently she’s set up stakes in Sacramento, COUNTRY and is dazzling the region with her heartfelt, husky voice and emotive, narrative roots- Americana tunes. In her travels, she’s recorded in Nashville, but her style isn’t of the strictly traditional twangy sound. She channels dynamic folk-rock singer Stevie Nicks and working-class icon Bruce Springsteen—alongside all the country music greats. There’s a refreshingly honest, human element in her music that’s lost on a lot of the big name country arena superstars. 1400 Alhambra Boulevard, www.facebook.com/Pjunlimited.

—Aaron Carnes

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THURSDAY 6/25

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Tipsy Thursdays, Top 40 deejay dancing, 9pm, call for cover

Fabulous and Gay Fridays, 9pm, call for cover

Saturday Boom, 9pm, call for cover

Sin Sunday, 8pm, call for cover

Mad Mondays, 9pm M, call for cover

SIMPLE CREATION, 9:30pm, no cover

GEORGIA ENGLISH & THE JUKEBOX KIDS, 9:30pm, call for cover

SANDRA DOLORES, 2-5pm, call for cover

Trivia Night, 6:30pm M, no cover; Open-mic night, 7:30pm W, no cover

HUMBLE WOLF, WOLFHOUSE, SEA WOLVES; 9pm, $6

HOT FOR TEACHER, FRED BARCHETTA; 8pm, $10

J. STALIN, LIVEWIRE; 8pm, $10-$20

Open-mic, 8pm M; PAMELA JEAN, BRIE, JESSE LOPEZ; 8pm W, $5-$7

HOLLYWOOD ENDING, 7 MINUTES IN

POTLUCK, J. TERRIBLE, NO GENRE,

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101 Main St., Roseville; (916) 774-0505

BLUE LAMP

1400 Alhambra, (916) 455-3400

THE BOARDWALK

I THE MIGHTY, HAIL THE SUN, TOO

CABANA WINERY & BISTRO 5610 Elvas Ave., (916) 476-5492

CENTER FOR THE ARTS

EDGAR WINTER, 8pm, $62-$67

COUNTRY CLUB SALOON

’80s music, 9pm, no cover

THE COZMIC CAFÉ

Open-mic, 7:30pm, no cover

314 W. Main St., Grass Valley; (530) 274-8384 4007 Taylor Rd., Loomis; (916) 652-4007

DISTRICT 30

Hip-hop and Top 40 Deejay dancing, 9pm, $5-$10

FOX & GOOSE

CHICKEN & DUMPLING, 8pm, no cover

ZYAH BELLE & THE FUNKSHUN, 9pm, $5

GÜERO, THE KYLE JESTER BLUES DUO; 9pm, $5

Open-mic, 7:30pm M; Pub Quiz, 7pm Tu; Northern Soul and Cornhole, 8pm W

G STREET WUNDERBAR

Celebrity Lip Sync, 10pm, call for cover

DJ Mouf, 10pm, no cover

ADHD, 10pm, call for cover

Karaoke, 9:30pm Tu, call for cover

1001 R St., (916) 443-8825 228 G St., Davis; (530) 756-9227

BILLY MANZIK, 9pm Tu, no cover

GOLDFIELD TRADING POST

TWO STEPS DOWN, 9pm, call for cover

HALFTIME BAR & GRILL

THIRD STAR WEST, 9pm-midnight, $5

ESSEX, 9pm-midnight, $5

1603 J St., (916) 476-5076

HARLOW’S

JONATHAN RICHMAN, 7pm, $15-$18; FAIRGROUND SAINTS, 10pm, $8-$10

TAINTED LOVE, 10pm, $15-$18

ANDY ALLO, 10pm, $20-$25

LUNA’S CAFÉ & JUICE BAR

Joe Montoya’s Poetry Unplugged, 8pm, $2

Poetica Erotica, 8-11pm, $5

DAVID HOUSTON & STRING THEORY, CHRISTOPHER FAIRMAN; 8:30pm, $6

NAKED LOUNGE DOWNTOWN

Comedy w/ Ian Bender, Stephen Ferris, CORY AND SOME LESSER MORTALS, FOX- CULPRITS, PSEUDOSILENCE, EMBRYO; Hunter Hill, Carlos Rodriguez, 8:30pm, $5 TAILS BRIGADE, HONYOCK; 8:30pm, $5 8:30pm, $5

Cirque de la Symphonie

Storm Large

06.24 THRU 07.05 One Festival, A World of Music

FRI.JUNE.26 SAT.JUNE.27 FRI.JULY.03

CONCERTS UNDER THE STARS Great Lawn, Nevada County Fairgrounds Randy Newman [8pm] Cirque de la Symphonie [8pm] Happy Birthday USA [8pm]

WEDS.JUNE.24 SUN.JUNE.28 WEDS.JULY.01

CLASSICS SERIES Amaral Center, Nevada County Fairgrounds The Glory of Russian Ballet [7:30pm] The Mozart Requiem [3pm] Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto [7:30pm]

LIL’ DEBBIE, 10pm, no cover

Hip-hop and Top 40 Deejay dancing, 9pm, $5-$10

1111 H St., (916) 443-1927

SN&R

DJ Romeo Reyes, 10pm, call for cover

Kamikaze Karaoke, 9pm-2am, no cover

2000 K St., (916) 448-7798

1414 16th St., (916) 441-3931

ERIK CHILDS, MADI SIPES, MONICA JOY; 8pm, $10

FACES

2708 J St., (916) 441-4693

MANZANITA, 9pm, no cover

Deuling Pianos, 9pm, no cover

5681 Lonetree Blvd., Rocklin; (916) 626-6366

THUR.JULY.02 SUN.JULY.05

VIC MENSA, TOWKIO; 7pm Tu, $23; AARON GILLESPIE, WILLIAM BECKETT; 6:30pm W

DIVE BAR

1022 K St., (916) 737-5999

Randy Newman

MONDAY-WEDNESDAY 6/29-7/1

THE WAILIN’ JENNYS, DAN AND LAUREL FRECHETTE; 8pm, $47-$82

DJ Billy Lane, 10pm, call for cover

1016 K St., (916) 737-5770

Want to be a hot show? Mail photos to Calendar Editor, SN&R, 1124 Del Paso Blvd., Sacramento, CA 95815 or email it to sactocalendar@ newsreview.com. Be sure to include date, time, location and cost of upcoming shows.

SUNDAY 6/28

9426 Greenback Ln., Orangevale; (916) 988-9247 CLOSE TO TOUCH, ALTESSA; 6:30pm, $10 HEAVEN, ASTRO SAFARI; 6:30pm, $15-$60 MODERN DAY PROFITS; 7pm, $16

594 Main St., Placerville; (530) 642-8481

Hey local bands!

SATURDAY 6/27

ENCORE PERFORMANCES Amaral Center, Nevada County Fairgrounds Conrad Tao, In Recital [7:30pm] Storm Large [7:30pm] A Beneﬁt Concert for MIM

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Dragalicious, 9pm, $5

Kamikaze Karaoke, 9pm M; Latin night, 9pm Tu, $5; DJ Alazzawi, 9pm W, $3

SUN MONKS, THE KELPS, IDEA TEAM, HONYOCK; 6pm, $8-$10 Nebraska Mondays, 7:30pm M; Open-mic comedy, 8pm Tu; Comedy, 8pm W, $5 Jazz session, 8pm M, no cover

FRIDAY 6/26

SATURDAY 6/27

1901 10th St., (916) 442-3504

Karaoke w/ Sac City Entertainment, 9pm, no cover

THURSDAY 6/25

STONEBERRY, FLYIN COWBOY; 9pm, $5

SUN VALLEY GUN CLUB, VACATIONER, WINNEBAGO; 9pm, $5

ON THE Y

Karaoke, 9pm, no cover

SOLANUM, WEST COAST FURY, IRON Karaoke, 9pm, no cover ASSAULT, BEYOND THE CEMETERY; 8pm

THE PALMS PLAYHOUSE

DUSTBOWL REVIVAL, 8pm, $20

ANTSY MCCLAIN & THE TRAILER PARK TROUBADOURS, 8pm, $25

DAVE ALVIN & THE GUILTY ONES, 8:30pm, $25

PARLARE EURO LOUNGE

Top 40, 9pm, no cover

Top 40, Mashups, 9pm, no cover

DJ Club mixes, 10pm, no cover

PISTOL PETE’S

Karaoke, 9pm, no cover

IRRELEVANT, NOVA SUTRO, SHOTBLAST; 9:30pm, $5

BLUES FARM, 9pm, $5

POWERHOUSE PUB

FOLSOM PRISM, 10pm, call for cover

LOST IN SUBURBIA, 10pm, call for cover

SPAZMATICS, 10pm, call for cover

HARLIS SWEETWATER, 3pm, call for cover

DJ Alazzawi, 10pm Tu, call for cover

THE PRESS CLUB

DJ Whores, 9pm, call for cover

Top 40 w/ DJ Rue, 9pm, $5

Top 40 w/ DJ Larry Rodriguez, 9pm, $5

Sunday Night Soul Party, 9pm, $5

GEORGIA ENGLISH & THE JUKEBOX KIDS, 8pm M; Youth dance party, 9pm Tu

SHADY LADY SALOON

HOT CITY, 9pm, call for cover

ROSS HAMMOND, 9pm, no cover

GOLDEN CADILLACS, 9pm, no cover

PETER PETTY, 9pm, no cover

SOPHIA’S THAI KITCHEN

HARRY AND THE HITMEN, 9pm, $5

OLD IRONSIDES

670 Fulton Ave., (916) 487-3731 13 Main St., Winters; (530) 795-1825 1009 10th St., (916) 448-8960

140 Harrison Ave., Auburn; (530) 885-5093 614 Sutter St., Folsom; (916) 355-8586 2030 P St., (916) 444-7914 1409 R St., (916) 231-9121

129 E St., Davis; (530) 758-4333

STARLITE LOUNGE

SUNDAY 6/28

MONDAY-WEDNESDAY 6/29-7/1 Karaoke, 9pm Tu, no cover; Open-mic, 9pm W, no cover

Open-mic comedy, 9pm, no cover

Karaoke, 9pm Tu, no cover

OH ROSE!, SPOOKY MANSION; 9pm, $5

Trivia Night, 9:30pm Tu, call for cover; Open-mic, 8pm W, call for cover CHRIS GOSLOW, 8pm W, call for cover

1517 21st St., (916) 704-0711

THE DEVIL’S TRAIN, THE MOANS, RHYTHM DRAGONS; 8pm, $8

GRAVESHADOW, FROM HELL, ARROWS OF AGONY, AXIOM; 9pm, $10

BIPOLAR, MALCOLM BLISS, STALKING DISTANCE, SALYTHIA; 8pm, $8-$10

STONEY INN/ROCKIN’ RODEO

BRITTANY BEXTON, 8pm, no cover

Country dancing,7:30pm, no cover; $5 after 8pm

Country dancing, 7:30pm, no cover; $5 after 8pm

Country dance party, 8pm, no cover

LATIN TOUCH, 6pm, $5

THE WIZ KID, 6:30pm, call for cover

SOLSA, 3pm, call for cover

PAILER AND FRATIS, 5:30-7:30pm; DC POWERS & THE ELECTRIC CO., 9pm, $8

PREACHER BOY, WALKING SPANISH; 9pm, $10

Blues jam, 4pm, no cover; You Front The MICHAEL RAY, 8pm Tu; SEAN LEHE & Band Live Karaoke, 8pm, no cover THE FAMILY PRACTICE, 9pm W, $5

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Oleander with Stroke 9 and Riotmaker 7pm Saturday, $18. Ace of Spades Rock

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Comedy open-mic, 8pm M; Bluebird Lounge open-mic, 5pm Tu, no cover

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Print ads start at $6/wk. www.newsreview.com or (916) 498-1234 ext. 5 Phone hours: M-F 9am-5pm. All ads post online same day. Deadlines for print: Line ad deadline: Monday 4pm Adult line ad deadline: Monday 4pm Display ad deadline: Friday 2pm

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*Nominal fee for adult entertainment. All advertising is subject to the newspaper’s Standards of Acceptance. Further, the News & Review specifically reserves the right to edit, decline or properly classify any ad. Errors will be rectified by re-publication upon notification. The N&R is not responsible for error after the first publication. The N&R assumes no financial liability for errors or omission of copy. In any event, liability shall not exceed the cost of the space occupied by such an error or omission. The advertiser and not the newspaper assumes full responsibility for the truthful content of their advertising message.

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My wife is always posting photos of me on social media singing my praises as a husband and father. Every time she posts a photo I am overwhelmed with guilt: I have very little sexual desire for my wife. Before dating her, I was mostly involved with men. When I told my wife she confessed to have “fooled around” with a female friend when she was in college. I tried by Joey ga to explain that the situation rcia was very different but she didn’t seem interested so I let a s k j o e y @ne w s re v i e w . c o m it go. We’re highly compatible as companions and as parents. Should I live without sex and Joey take pleasure from being a father believes in dreams while enjoying the companionship that change lives. that marriage offers? Or should I tell my wife the truth? “You’re only as sick as your secrets” is an old saying in Alcoholics Anonymous, and for good reason. There’s a psychological and spiritual burden to hiding who we are. Deception becomes a habit quickly. Soon afterward, the human ego slides into denial to protect itself from admitting regression. That’s no way to live.

You might separate or divorce. Or, you may wish to stay married and explore delicious new ways of creating sexual satisfaction. I’m a fan of honesty, even if it hurts. But I’m also committed to growing in integrity. That means I must devote my mind, heart and soul to shaking out a deeper truth from the questions that arise in my life. In your case, a safe container, like therapy, will help you to discover what you really desire. You might separate or divorce. Or, you may wish to stay married and explore delicious new ways of creating sexual satisfaction. Applicable blog posts and classes can be found here: www.goodvibrations.com. A competent psychotherapist can also help you confront parts of your story that offer clues about why you created the life you are living. One curious sign is your confession about your sexual preference. You felt that your wife replied with a non sequitur so you attempted to correct her. That didn’t work. But instead

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of accepting that she just didn’t understand you, or a core aspect of who you are, you continued into marriage. Why? Maybe you settled for companionship. There’s nothing wrong with that, if it makes you happy. But if you settled, and realize it was a mistake, there’s still time to begin the life you were meant to lead with the right man for you. I’m a disabled veteran and I have spent my life taking care of friends, family and soldiers. Now that it’s time for me to take care of me, I’m struggling to find a meaningful relationship. I want to find a mate to share this life journey with me but have had little to no success. There are so many dating sites that it’s both overwhelming and intimidating. Can you help? Yes! Healthy romantic relationships require that we commit to cherishing ourselves. So continue your intention of self-care. After all, the first meaningful human relationship is with ourselves. Finding a companion who inspires and delights you, whose interests sync with yours, and whose annoying qualities are tolerable (and vice versa) is easy. The difficult part is allowing a relationship to develop beyond the breathless, brainless infatuation phase. Online dating sites offer one option for meeting others. But the emphasis on photos, not profiles, tends to cultivate infatuation and superficial connections. So let online dating be one path to a relationship, but not your only one. The most important activity is to keep an open mind and heart, daily. Approach every outing— from a run for groceries to actual dates—with curiosity. Consider each date an opportunity to get to know yourself and to grow in clarity about what you want in a partner. Eventually, the right mate will show up in your life. In the meantime, love the journey to love. Ω

Meditation of the Week In honor of the Sacramento French Film Festival, which continues Friday, June 26, to Sunday, June 28, at the Crest Theatre, enjoy this quote from The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, one of the most popular French films of all time: “You’re better suited for making love than for making war.” What are you best suited for?

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Buds and babies Is there any consensus based on scientific data or professional opinion regarding the need for pregnant women to stop smoking cannabis? Also, how about just before becoming pregnant for both the future mother and father? While my first question refers to the health of the fetus, my second question refers to the condition of the egg and sperm. —Sacto Mike Consensus? Hah! We are talking about cannabis. by There is no such thing as “consensus.” Everyone has an agenda. That being said, the studies that were done in the ’60s and ’70s showed that cannabis use was not harmful to fetuses. In fact, when a sk420 @ n ewsreview.c om Melanie Dreher studied Rastafarian women in Jamaica, she found that the babies of cannabis users were in better shape than the babies of nonusers of cannabis (http://cannabisclinicians.org/wp-content/ uploads/2012/03/Dreher-Pediatrics.pdf). Everyone knows that cannabis is great for nausea and emesis (fancy words for feeling like you are gonna vomit, and actually vomiting). As to the health of the egg and sperm, there seem to be no deleterious effects. For a while, cannabis use was thought to affect the motility of the spermatozoa (I am full of words today. Must be We are talking about big all the coffee), but, and cannabis. There this is anecdotal, my dad sired five smart, healthy, is no such thing as awesome kids while puffing yang of weed the whole “consensus.” atime. My kids are also awesome, and my (now ex-) wife and I had no problem getting pregnant. I AM NOT A DOCTOR, so I am not giving out medical advice, but I would say that cannabis use during pregnancy is a personal decision, and counsel moderation in all things. Have fun trying! LUM NGAIO BEA

I’ve always disagreed with the amount of cannabis one should be “allowed” to possess: No one has EVER proposed a set amount of alcohol you can buy at one time or possess. So, why should we propose any “limit” to the amount of cannabis one can buy and possess? Alcohol is a dangerous drug. And the more one drinks, the more dangerous it is. If there’s no limit to either purchase or consumption of that, and cannabis is infinitely safer, what’s the reasoning to limitations about cannabis? I think I know why: To make the ostensibly bitter pill easier to swallow for purposes of public and governmental acceptance, we’re soft-selling cannabis. Sure, it needs to be legalized everywhere, but conflating arcane American moralistic ethos with our demand for legalization is completely absurd. We don’t need to suck on the asshole of draconian fucks who promulgate outright hypocrisy, i.e. alcohol is “good” because it’s “legal” but cannabis is illegal because we say so, scientific evidence to the contrary. I know that you know this already but, really, this bullshit of soft-sell does us a disservice. I’d like to think that, by this point in time, we’d have the fortitude to tell it and sell it like it really is.

Ngaio Bealum

is a Sacramento comedian, activist and marijuana expert. Email him questions at ask420@ newsreview.com.

—LB Strong words. You answered your own question. As it stands now, medical cannabis patients are allowed to possess up to 8 ounces. I feel like a half-pound of weed is a pretty good stash. No need to get the squares all riled up. Ω BEFORE

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by Rachel leibROck

ARIES (March 21-April 19): During my

regular hikes along my favorite trails, I’ve gotten to know the local boulders quite intimately. It might sound daft, but I’ve come to love them. I’ve even given some of them names. They symbolize stability and constancy to me. When I gaze at them or sit on them, I feel my own resolve grow stronger. They teach me about how to be steadfast and unflappable in all kinds of weather. I draw inspiration from the way they are so purely themselves, forever true to their own nature. Now would be an excellent time for you to hang out with your own stony allies, Aries. You could use a boost in your ability to express the qualities they embody.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): “Everyone is a genius at least once a year,” wrote German aphorist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. “The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.” According to my astrological analysis, Taurus, your once-a-year explosion of genius is imminent. It’s even possible you will experience a series of eruptions that continue for weeks. The latter scenario is most likely if you unleash the dormant parts of your intelligence through activities like these: having long, rambling conversations with big thinkers; taking long, rambling walks all over creation; enjoying long, rambling sex while listening to provocative music.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): “I think if

we didn’t contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring,” says author Paul Auster. “It would be tedious to be alive.” But he goes even further in his defense of inconsistency, adding, “Changing your mind is probably one of the most beautiful things people can do.” This bold assertion may not apply to everyone all the time, but it does for you in the coming weeks, Gemini. You should feel free to explore and experiment with the high art of changing your mind. I dare you to use it to generate extravagant amounts of beauty.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): In its early

days, the band Depeche Mode had the infinitely boring name Composition of Sound. Humphrey Bogart’s and Ingrid Bergman’s classic 1942 film Casablanca was dangerously close to being called Everybody Comes to Rick’s. And before Charles Dickens published his novel Bleak House, a scathing critique of the 19th-century British judicial system, he considered 11 other possible titles, including the unfortunate Tom-all-Alone’s. The Solitary House that was always shut up and never Lighted. I bring this to your attention, Cancerian, as the seeding phase of your personal cycle gets underway. The imprints you put on your budding creations will have a major impact on their future. Name them well. Give them a potent start.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): One summer

afternoon when I was 7 years old, my friend Billy and I grabbed an empty jar from my kitchen and went looking for ants. Near the creek we found an anthill swarming with black ants, and scooped a bunch of them in the jar. A little later we came upon a caravan of red ants, and shoved many of them in with the black ants. Would they fight? Naturally. It was mayhem. Looking back now, I’m sorry I participated in that stunt. Why stir up a pointless war? In that spirit, Leo, I urge you to avoid unnecessary conflicts. Don’t do anything remotely comparable to putting red ants and black ants in the same jar.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): In order for

everyone in your sphere to meet their appointed destinies, you must cultivate your skills as a party animal. I’m only slightly joking. At least for now, it’s your destiny to be the catalyst of conviviality, the ringleader of the festivities, the engineer of fun and games. To fulfill your assignment, you may have to instigate events that encourage your allies to leave their comfort zones and follow you into the frontiers of collaborative amusement.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Your symbolic

object of the week is a magic wand. I recommend that you visualize yourself as the star of a fairy tale in which you do indeed have a wand at your disposal. See yourself wielding it to carry out a series of fantastic tricks, like materializing a pile of gold

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bRezsny

coins or giving yourself an extraordinary power to concentrate or creating an enchanted drink that allows you to heal your toughest wound. I think this playful imaginative exercise will subtly enhance your ability to perform actual magic in the real world.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): The

taskmaster planet Saturn wove its way through the sign of Scorpio from October 2012 until the end of 2014. Now it has slipped back into your sign for a last hurrah. Between now and mid-September. I urge you to milk its rigorous help in every way you can imagine. For example, cut away any last residues of trivial desires and frivolous ambitions. Hone your focus and streamline your self-discipline. Once and for all, withdraw your precious energy from activities that waste your time and resist your full engagement. And if you’re serious about capitalizing on Saturn’s demanding gifts, try this ritual: Write either “I will never squander my riches” or “I will make full use of my riches” 20 times—whichever motivates you most.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21):

The advanced lessons on tap in the coming days are not for the squeamish, the timid, the lazy or the stubborn. But then you’re not any of those things, right? So there shouldn’t be a major problem. The purpose of these subterranean adventures and divine interventions is to teach you to make nerve-racking leaps of faith, whether or not you believe you’re ready. Here’s one piece of advice that I think will help: Don’t resist and resent the tests as they appear. Rather, welcome them as blessings you don’t understand yet. Be alert for the liberations they will offer.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19):

“Man’s being is like a vast mansion,” observed philosopher Colin Wilson, “yet he seems to prefer to live in a single room in the basement.” Wilson wasn’t just referring to Capricorns. He meant everybody. Most of us commit the sin of self-limitation on a regular basis. That’s the bad news. The good news, Capricorn, is that you’re entering a time when you’re more likely to rebel against the unconscious restrictions you have placed on yourself. You will have extra motivation to question and overrule the rationales that you used in the past to inhibit your primal energy. Won’t it be fun to venture out of your basement nook and go explore the rest of your domain?

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): “An

obscure moth from Latin America saved Australia’s pasture-land from the overgrowth of cactus,” writes biologist Edward O. Wilson. “A Madagascar ‘weed,’ the rosy periwinkle, provided the cure for Hodgkin’s disease and childhood leukemia,” he adds, while “a chemical from the saliva of leeches dissolves blood clots during surgery,” and a “Norwegian fungus made possible the organ transplant industry.” I think these are all great metaphors for the kind of healing that will be available for you in the coming weeks, Aquarius: humble, simple, seemingly insignificant things whose power to bring transformation has, up until now, been secret or unknown.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): “She is

hard to tempt, as everything seems to please her equally,” said artist Anne Raymo in describing a hedonistic acquaintance. A similar statement may soon apply to you, Pisces. You will have a talent for finding amusement in an unusually wide variety of phenomena. But more than that: You could become a connoisseur of feeling really good. You may even go so far as to break into a higher octave of pleasure, communing with exotic phenomena that we might call silken thrills and spicy bliss and succulent revelry.

You can call Rob Brezsny for your Expanded Weekly Horoscope: (900) 950-7700. $1.99 per minute. Must be 18+. Touchtone phone required. Customer service (612) 373-9785. And don’t forget to check out Rob’s website at www.realastrology.com.

Life, in a sober frame Roseville native Adam Jones was only 19 when he moved to San Francisco, started working as an escort and became addicted to drugs. Jones, who finally ended up in rehab, is now 21, one-year sober and an aspiring filmmaker. In April he released an experimental art film Teaser, which documents his troubled past. The black-and-white short just screened in South Africa as part of the Durban Gay & Lesbian Film Festival. Jones, who also works as a waiter, chatted with SN&R about his former life on the streets, inspirations and why he hopes the film will “make a small mark” in the LGBT community.

How did you end up as an escort? I left Roseville at 17 and moved to New York for about two years. … I was so young, but being in a city full of artists gave me lots of material. I was studying [film] on my own, taking online classes. That’s when I came out. I spent a good two years there trying to figure out who I was and then came back to my hometown. ... I immediately missed city life but ... I had so little money, so I took a train to [San Francisco] and [rented] a room. I was doing nothing, I was just wandering around the city, doing some catering and modeling. … I was trying to make money and [escorting] was an option to make quick and easy money—and a lot of it. It was then that I really lost myself.

Lost yourself how? I started experimenting with drugs. I was offered drugs daily. It started with weed, which led to harder drugs. I was also taken advantage of by older men. I was young and naive. I was selling my body for money, I had no self-worth and no respect. I started shooting footage around the city; I went to the gritty areas and started shooting the homeless and in alleyways. That gave me some material to use for Teaser.

And then what? I was making a couple thousand dollars a night, [but] one day I woke up—I had gotten to the point where I knew that this wasn’t what I wanted. I saw a lot of guys like me doing the same thing or in situations that were worse than mine. I got on a train and moved back to Sacramento; I’d met someone online who had introduced me to meth and I tried it with this guy, and that’s when the nine-month roller coaster started.

Roller coaster? I was homeless, moving from house to house, couch surfing, trying to figure out where to go. This guy online offered me a place to stay and that gave me comfort, but also led to destruction and daily drug use.

Where did the filmmaking come in? Anyone who tries drugs for the first time learns to have some kind of hobby while

F E AT U R E

PHOTO BY kEvin CORTOPAssi

by ROb

For the week of June 25, 2015

STORY

A RT S & C U LT U R E

under the influence. Mine was taking cellphone videos and putting filters on them—that helped me make sense of what I was doing. I started uploading them [to Vimeo] and that gave me the idea to make films. … It was a kind of art, and I wanted to make something good out of something bad.

footage for me but it didn’t turn out, so I decided to capture it on my own. I grabbed a video camera and started revisiting locations I’d had a binge at: the home [where I stayed], the apartment complex I hung out at, where everything started. I was wandering around, reliving those experiences.

What finally led to rehab?

Filmmaker inspirations?

I was going to my mom’s to get a bite to eat. She’d see what I was doing and was so disgusted. She’d make me look in the mirror. She’s a nurse and had insurance [which covered] rehab. I went to a camp rehab the first time, in Santa Cruz. I was there four days and left, hopped on a bus and went straight back to the guy’s house where I’d been staying. I thought I could control it, that it was just for fun … from there it just spiraled. I had three more attempts and then the fourth attempt after one night when I was using and [hallucinating] that people were chasing me. I ended up in downtown Sacramento, barefoot and wandering around. That’s when I realized, “What am I doing? What has my life become?” It was an awakening—a spiritual awakening. … I was in rehab for 30 days and helped by a good group of instructors. I’ve been out of rehab for one year now.

I’m such a fan of Kenneth Anger, a gay filmmaker from the ’40s, for his vision and his artistic [style]. As a kid, I was a big fan of J.J. Abrams, I was a big fan of Alias. I love the way Rob Zombie recreated Halloween and made his own rendition of it.

What led to the film? It took months after treatment to really have a sober frame of mind and clear approach to the story and get the visuals I had in my mind together. I had all these narratives [that were] dreamlike, a representation of the destruction. I threw $200 down to a local filmmaker to shoot some |

AFTER

You’ve said this film represents the “darker” side of the LGBT community —how so? I know a lot of young guys like myself who are probably experimenting with the same things I have: the drug of choice that’s popular right now, the community of the moment. My philosophy is making a horrible experience into something good and trying to make sense of what your experience was, instead of forgetting and moving on. Specifically to young men who have dealt with same things I have, what I’m saying through this [film] is always remember that it can get better. Focus on the future. There are plenty of gay men who don’t use drugs at all and probably wouldn’t understand my type of film at all, but for people who are struggling right now, this is for them. Ω Learn more about Teaser at https://vimeo.com/126219753.

06.25.15

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