stormyhusky

For me every trip to Sonoma County is a fresh look at a region teeming with history, inebration and trees. But Sonoma isn't just a place where tourists drink wine and eat expensive food. Napa's hipper neighbor may be just that, but it is also a cave of mysteries, and one of California's biggest (and best) parties. At a certain point, somewhere between Guerneville and Geyserville, Sonoma ceases to be a place and becomes a lifestyle. Eccentricity is woven thick into the Sonoma pile, beer is brewed sarcastically, and dead-end dirt roads may lead you into the beyond (we can't really be sure). Needless to say, I like it up there.

I spent the weekend enjoying the festivities at Passport to Dry Creek Valley. It was equal parts delicious learning experience and dream-like Fellini film. We rubbed elbows with wine-drunk locals, tasted cask-fresh sangioveses, watched a man on a unicycle play the saw, enjoyed the 90 degree weather and barn art (below). Appreciation must be given for the magical experience created by the winemakers at Bella.

Of course, there was food. Highlights have to include: devouring a pile of just-picked radishes at The Girl and The Fig in Sonoma town, smoked mozzarella pizza at Scopa and baked truffle eggs at Bovolo in Healdsburg, inches-thick burrata bruschetta at Sweetwater Musical Hall in enviable Mill Valley and all the various and sundry vintages at the 8 (count 'em) wineries we were able to hit on Sunday.

Thanks, Sonoma. Thanks, Marin. Hope to see you soon.

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At The Grind in Redwood City, CA

I had a dream last night about one Daniel Pinchbeck, and it seems as good a time as any to mention his book, which as far as I can tell has been just as life-changing (or life-affirming) for me as, say, Jack Kerouac's On The Road, Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth, or Ry Cooder & Ali Farka Toure's seminal Talking Timbuktu. Basically, it continues to change the way I think about everything.

2012: Return to Quetzalcoatl is a pretty serious breaking open of the head (aliens, crop circles, Mayan prophesies, noosphere, et al.) but if your up for it, you may find that the book reads you just as much as you read the book. If the heady weight of its 416 pages seems a bit too all-consuming, there is also an excellent documentary titled 2012: Time For Change, available on Netflix Instant Watch, which pretty well sums up the finer points of Pinchbeck's labyrinthine thesis.

I didn't want to be one of those people that starts hawking neo-new-age gibberish and New World prophesies ("Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit") at my own moment of clarity, but I truly feel that these are ideas for everyone, their basis in history, politics, love, sociology, philosophy, science, poetry, astrology and art. According to Pinchbeck, it's all the same thing. Pretty neat, huh?

Photograph taken at Scarlet Sage Herb Co., San Francisco, CA.

Stevens Creek Canyon Rd.

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@ the Hemlock Tavern, San Francisco, CA.

Excellent sets from both Please Do Not Fight and Hell & Lula. And good to see some familiar faces (who rocked off the faces.)

Palo Alto, how I loved thee.

(An alley.)

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It's breezy and warm in the Bay Area and sweltering (85+) in Chicago on this, the first day of Spring. I'm listening to Bela Fleck's Tabula Rasa (Water Lily Acoustics) and thinking about the winter that wasn't, and the winter that I missed.

My first post on this blog was in February of last year, just after Snowmageddon, the infamous storm that froze Chicago for two days. The one we should have griped about was the only one we didn't, because the world shut down and the city was our playground. But I always said I wouldn't do another Chicago winter, and here I am, in California, having missed all of the winter that never really came. Where there should have been snow dumped and shoveled, icy sidewalks and bitter wind, there were coolish temperatures and dry skies. Chicagoans are rejoicing today as they lounge on beaches and bike up and down the Lakeshore, but I can't help but be infinitely sorry for (and conveniently removed from) Chicago's anticlimactic winter. I find it unsettling, just as I have Northern California's winter of little rain. A Midwestern winter should be cold, should be difficult and mostly horrible. It makes Chicagoans who they are. Hardy folk. Monuments.

The one week I did spend in Chicago this year was cold but not unbearable. I was really hoping for a little white, but Chicago still delivered, as it always does.

Pictured: Kickstand Coffee @ Clark & Belmont (with 'om' chai) and The Art Institute (Monet room).

I was lucky enough to witness an incredible natural phenomenon earlier this year. I saw what I was later told were swifts doing this in Alexander Valley, a sort of primordial avian dance at sunset. Needless to say I was too stunned and too small to capture this treat on film. Luckily, someone else did. Apparently, it's big in Rome.

From Wired:

"To achieve their extraordinary coordination, starling flocks in flight behave mathematically like metals becoming magnetized..."
"...an example of a system where collective phenomena emerge from short-range interactions."

Video

I know I've been slacking lately, but at times the world is interesting enough that it isn't photographable. I hope that's partly why.

It sure is an interesting world we live in. Richard Nixon's love letters are now on display to the public (no thanks) and the first Bald Eagle in more than 100 years has been spotted within Chicago city limits. (Bird does not = guns; smile)

Solar flares are flying. Excavations and realizations continue to shatter what we think we know about our planet and the universe...and I can't tell if this, in particular, is great or disturbing. Probably it will have a good soundtrack.

Photograph taken in Golden Gate Park.