Read.Eat.Listen: Water & Weather

Some mornings are worth everything. Such was the case today, when after dropping Kwame at the airport, I stopped for a walk by "the birds" on the way home. That's what we've come to call the Elsie B Roemer Sanctuary on the west side of the east side of the island. The sun wasn't quite up, and everything was blue and pink, the only other folks on the trail were far and few between. The Sanctuary, however, was going off, a riot of Pelicans souring, Canada Geese honking, terns twittering and oyster catchers hueeping past. Alameda is a good place to be if you're not-so-secretly a bird geek.

I make a determination every week or so to get out to "the birds"  daily, but as I don't live in easy walking distance anymore, I often forget. The world is a wonder if you pause a moment to take it in. I'm reminding myself this as much as anyone else, who often forgets that all that I love is close by. Times like this morning are usually when I make the determination anew.

In the wake of the latest spate of climate change news  — thank you Obama for the Clean Power Plan — I've been reading up on sea level rise in California again. Many people have been trying to alert the masses to this eventuality for a few years now, and now word is really out. It's hard to imagine what this will mean for the place I call home. On a flood map, our little patch of island, is still that, an island, but the shore will be much closer. Then it will be easier to get out to "the birds"... if the birds are still having any of it...

Read: "Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life" by William Finnegan. I've only surfed (or tried to) a couple of times— alas, even growing up in Santa Cruz County I never lost my fear of the cold, changeable ocean. That said, I love the ocean, its coast and have always loved surf culture...and I LOVE this book, and have barely been able to put it down this week. I get the feeling Finnegan, a longtime writer for The New Yorker who has had a life-long push-pull affair with surfing, could rewrite a phone book so it was engaging, but this really is a notable memoir. Anyone whose spent time on the California coast or in Hawaii will appreciate the insider's view Finnegan depicts so well, from the people, to the waters to the tortures and rewards of loving something deeply. 

Eat: Japanese Sweet Potato. A humble vegetable that gives. I can and do eat them straight up. This is a recipe that splits the difference: Roasted Japanese Sweet Potatoes

Listen: We saw Ray Wylie Hubbard at The Freight last week, my first time seeing this Texas musician. Been there, seen it all, looked-under-every-rock, not-afraid-to-say-anything gritty goodness.

Read.Eat.Listen: Tides & Vistas

In addition to mornings, views are one of my favorite things about life. Sometimes, I think I live for the long view: the broad expanse of sea and sky from a high mountaintop, the sweeping view of the East Bay from the 980 when you come off the Bay Bridge, the seemingly endless terrain of desert in the Mojave. There's no question, no answer, just that. A couple of weeks ago, we were up on Mt. Tam to play the Father's Day brunch and everything suddenly made sense again.
Of course a high wouldn't be a high without a low. The tides of peaks and valleys, dark and light go in and out, and I followed up that weekend with a few days holed away, looking back, while scanning a genealogy book my great-aunt put together. My aunt had chronicled six generations on my father's side, before passing away in 1998, and the book has languished on various relatives shelves til getting to my hands a couple of years ago. I don't know what finally clicked, but I finally turned toward it, and began the process of archiving her materials. I was struck, as I went through each page, by how much detail she had amassed pre-Internet,  and how much of the story of my family is a tide running back and forth between fighting wars and going back to the land to farm/ranch/homestead, inching East to Wests, with stops in the South and in the Rockies, and finally to California, over a couple of centuries. There are also many gaps and question marks about particular characters in this narrative – where did the great-grandfather get to between St. Louis and Oakland? Who was my aunt's first husband? Questions, questions. Suddenly I'm back in the fog.
Read:  And so All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West by David Gessner feels like a friend this week, detailing the lives of two authors/activist I read avidly while in college, while traveling much of the terrain I knew well when I lived in Boulder, asking questions about motive and character, our relationship to land and our seemingly inevitable exploitation of its resources.  
Eat: Mint and summer just go together and throwing a bunch of fresh mint into a salad can be especially satisfying: "Kale/Tomato/Feta/Mint Salad"
Listen:Veruca Salt is back at it after a long break from recording.

Read.Eat.Listen: Pools

My sister was pushing me faster and faster around the pool, as I lay on one of those inflatable floating mats. This was thrilling. There was much shrieking and splashing. And then the mat flipped. All was quiet as I swam underwater for what was likely no longer than 15 seconds, but felt like a vast sea of calm.
My family was up at the river, visiting my aunt and uncle who had the place in Guerneville with the pool. On a hill full of redwood trees, the cabin's northern California landscape setting wasn't so different than the one that surrounded our house, a few hours south. But "The River" was a different place. People came here to get away from the city, to retreat and frolic and vacation, not raise kids (though of course, there are plenty of families here, too).  Along the clean air and views of the country, the little unincorporated town had a bakery and  restaurants within walking distance of my aunt and uncle's place.
The fact that they had a swimming pool, a round fiberglass number,  was a big deal at the time.  I must have had a swimming lesson or two by the time I visited, but as a rule, we didn't swim much.  When it was hot in the summers, we ran through the sprinklers to cool off if we didn't head to the beach. Our favored, and closest, beach, 10 miles west of where we lived, had huge signs in the sand warning of rip currents. We didn't dare go in past our knees. So the sudden immersion into the round, not-too-deep-but-deeper-than-a-seven-year-old pool waters turned into my first 'swim.' I was pleased with myself when I surfaced, but my mom was as angry, and scared, as if I'd been swept away by one of those Pacific riptides. It was a confusing re-entry, kind of like taking a nap and then walking outside onto a construction site. Perhaps its why swimming pools never really became my place of solace. Still, in lieu of a beach....
Read: I'm already annoyed* with Michelle Goldberg's book "The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Woman Who Helped Bring Yoga to the West," or rather with Goldberg, but I'm eating up this book all the same. Indra Devi, one of the more famous and few women students of  Sri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, had a long and colorful life so she makes for a great subject. 
*Goldberg breezily (which is damningly and inaccurate) describes traditional Ashtanga yoga as being originally intended for young boys.
Eat: Chances are, we were eating Popsicles while poolside. Those multi-color rocket ones or maybe a fudgesicile. Circa 2015, I'd make it more like this vegan Fresh Summer Apricot Pop.
Listen:  More recently, we've found ourselves driving on a lot of dirt roads, in the desert a couple weeks ago and this past weekend in Marin. Some of the best listening while driving those dirt roads, we found, was the wonderful and wise Greg Brown. I love his daughter Pieta Brown's music, too, so I started digging up more of her tunes. Goodness.
Then I found this video of Pieta Brown playing a Lucinda Williams song with Greg Brown and Bo Ramsey. So here you go:

Read.Eat.Listen: Shed

I'm thinking of the word 'shed' as in shedding skins. Like a snake, or a cat or dog in summer. We drove down to Joshua Tree again, to spend a week in a homesteader cabin seeing what arose. Or at least that's my main goal, to get quiet, shed my usual business of late, as much chatter as possible, and see what remains, or comes up. Two nights in, I'm feeling a bit lighter, aided and abetted by the impossibility of sleeping in around here. The sun rises at 5:33 and comes streaming through all parts of this updated cabin surrounded by BLM land and other historic homesteader tracts. Somewhere, beyond that flue sky, there's a full moon, June's Strawberry moon (in Saggitarious I'm told), but for the moment it's all about desert birdsong: a symphony of doves, quail, finches and the occasional whir of a passing hummingbird and 'churr' of a cactus wren. 

READ: A fun little book to read here, regarding local history, is "Jackrabbit Homestead: Tracing the Small Tract Act in the Southern California Landscape, 1938-2008" by Kim Stringfellow. The Small Tract Act was designed to "dispose of 'useless' federal lands from the public lands," allowing citizens "to lease up to 5 acres of desert for recreational purposes or for home or business." Fast-forward to now and you have a variety of interests - from artists to climbers, military families to outlaws, year-round residents to tourists - utilizing these tracts.

EAT: The UN recommends a vegan diet to combat climate change. Can you do it? I have at times, been vegan, but have wavered in the past few years. A turn toward a deeper shade of green maybe in order. www.epicuriousvegan.com

LISTEN: We loaded up the CD player with the work of several fine Bay Area musicians we know and appreciate, and whiled away the hours listening. None of these Cds are brand new, but all stand to give for some years. 

Gayle Lynn and the Hired Hands: Just Came Around 

Michael McNevin: 2010 Song Sampler

Jim Bruno: The Patron Saint of Lost Causes. 

Read.East.Listen: Falling

Falling down is a part of life, getting back up is living. — Anonymous

 In one of those slightly embarrassing moments, I tripped and fell in my own house while moving a ladder to do some painting (can't even say I was on the ladder).  The good news is I didn't break anything,  but I did bruise the hell out of my hip and knee. I had a good wail for a minute, pouted for another five, wrote what will likely be a new blues song...and then got up and finished the painting. Still, in the past few days I've woken up feeling like I've been in a car wreck. So I've been moving a bit slow, taking arnica and ... being happy there is plenty to eat and read and hear.
Read: Hold Still, by Sally Mann, was just delivered to my Kindle/iPad and I can't wait to dig in. A memoir by the acclaimed and controversial photographer, the effort has been getting great reviews, and I enjoyed the recent excerpt New York Times.

Eat: Ferments.  I love kimchi these days, as well as certain home-made pickles, so what a treat to have opportunity to order the board full of them at Gather Restaurant the other night. Pretty, too.

Listen: The always good Shelby Lynne has a new one out! "I Can't Imagine"

Read.Eat.Listen: All

Anyone who has practiced traditional Ashtanga yoga has heard "practice and all is coming." It was one of Ashtanga-originator Pattabhi Jois's favorite instructions: a succint way of saying: do your practice first, everything else, the 'all' of life, positive and negative, as well as the fruits of practice, will work themselves out. It's at once an inspiring, maddening and accurate instruction. Inspiring, because when things are hard, who doesn't want to hear that it will change or become clear? Maddening, as this direction is nowhere near a quick fix. And accurate, because, as someone who began Ashtanga during a low, low point in ones life, I've experienced the steady expansion that goes hand-in-hand with regular practice. Even when I've felt pissed, injured, bored, old, lazy, or disappointed with my practice, I know now, over years of coming back to the mat, all (all kinds of all) does come.

This week, quite serendipitously, we had opportunity to stay a few days at Rancho Valencia, a spa resort in San Diego County replete with tennis courts, swimming pools, fine restaurants, olive and citrus orchards, beehives, and multiple swimming pools. Tastefully decorated with original art, our suite was larger than our house and just as comfortable (if not more so!). The only thing missing was our cat...who will likely never forgive us. Hummingbirds buzzed the patio morning and evening, and freshly squeezed orange juice was delivered to our door each morning. A lot of allness! 

Though our every need was taken care of, and there was even a yoga pavilion, I ventured outside the grounds a couple of mornings, to practice at the Ashtanga Yoga Center on the border of Encinitas and Carlsbad. I've made many trips to Encinitas over the years, as it's the first place in the United States that Pattabhi Jois taught when he first came to the States in the 70s, and several teachers have since maintained Ashtanga's strong roots here. I practiced with Jois here in 2002, on one of his many teaching trips, and several times with Sharath Rangaswamy after he took over the reigns from Jois upon his passing.  Likewise, one of Jois's first American students, Tim Miller, has run hid influential Ashtanga Yoga Center here for many years. I was fortunate to practice at his studio this week, my first visit to the Carlsbad location. While the studio is now inland a bit, in one of San Diego County's seemingly omnipresent malls, Miller's big heart and dedication permeates the Center, a practice environment that strikes an admirable balance between friendly, relaxed and focused. 

Read: Oliver Sacks' "On the Move." If you've read any of his other books or articles — "Awakenings" or "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat"—you know Sacks is brilliant and human, warm and wise, light-hearted and endlessly curious. I'm so glad he sought to pen and complete his memoir "On the Move" which is a beautiful look inside the life and mind of one of our greats.

Eat: "Food is the final frontier [of practice]," wrote another senior Ashtanga teacher, David Garrigues, and this entry, alas, doesn't speak to a fully-tamed frontier (albeit all the food in question is organic). I first tasted hushpuppies as a 10-year-old on my first trip through the deep, southern US. Fried and with a name I thought was funny, the Louisiana-made cornmeal hushpuppies weren't anything like I'd tasted before. I can still remember the wonder I felt at their flavor. But I was only visiting the south and its cuisine. I've seldom come across hushpuppies since (and they're definitely not a dish that fits with my attempts at healthy yoga-practice encouraging eating). Regardless, when I saw "wild ramp and garlic hushpuppies" on the menu at Full of Life Flatbread, the foodie and wine-wise restaurant in Los Alamos where we pit-stopped on our way to San Diego, I had to place an order. They were presented beautifully in a white bowl with yummy green goddess dressing. I was a little underwhelmed by their flavors, but my childhood memory is a hard one to live up to. I'm not complaining. These circa 2015, California versions evoked a strong and happy memory...and went great with the house red, a salad and some of Full of Life's truffle-oil infused cauliflower soup. Yum. 

Listen: Truth be told, we've mainly been listening to ourselves this week, rehearsing our Desert Songs between the yoga and work that brought us here. Nonetheless, we perked up when The Carolina Chocolate Drops came on the radio amid our drive. Modern roots music with a side of gospel, this group is talented, spirited and aware...and no secret. They're at SF Jazz Center in May. 

Read.Eat.Listen: Iterations

I grew up on a wooded hill so I'm always jonesing a little for a nature hike. Getting outside is generally the most reliable head clearer. These days, living in Alameda, the San Francisco Bay is both the backyard and the nature escape. And with no hills to climb, that means heading for either the beach or on the water.  On Friday, we took off for a long-planned overnight sail to Paradise Bay, a lovely anchorage on the east side of Tiburon. We'd sailed there more than a year ago and I had memories of a smooth sail, warm air and gentle anchorage, suitable for a little yoga on the deck and napping in the sun. Anticipating a similarly idyllic two days, I dressed in shorts, brought my iPad writing set-up, and we added the mandolin to the on board instrument inventory. However, though the weather was warm and clear when we set out on Friday, the water soon became choppy and rough. Out came the long pants and foulies.

It should be noted here that while I'm a pretty experienced outdoors person,  I'm really a fair weather sailor. Suddenly, I was feeling nauseous.  Fortunately my captain is more than capable, and ably navigated the rough patch while I worked on steadying myself. 
I was reminded how easily the mind gets attached to an idea of how things should be like they were before. Hah! Paradise, it turns out, like everything, is changeable.  The upside of the strong wind and current was arriving at Paradise Bay in record time, albeit amid high winds, cool air and a half-hidden sun.
Once I got over partially cloudy and cool weather, I embraced our actual circumstance. There's something so soothing about sleeping on water. And waking to coyotes howling through the morning fog and loons paddling on the calm morning water isn't bad either.
Read: The Folded Clock, by Heidi Julavits, is a diary, but it's nonlinear. Comprised of two years of highly literate entries, each started with "Today, I..." Julavits mines insights about her everyday motivations and encounters with bracing candor, about herself, her strength and shortcomings, creating a new order of experience.

Eat: A friend handed me some scissors and directed me into her garden recently to harvest some of the many fava beans she'd grown. I shelled them for salad and for pasta and proceeded to see fava's everywhere, on menus and grocery bins. Fava beans,  are something I would have hated as a kid and now find beautiful. Large and green and kidney shaped, I like them as much for their aesthetic as their flavor. This Fava Bean and Pecorino dish is simple and pretty.
Listen: I've been fortunate to hear a lot of great live music lately a while reviewing shows for No Depression. Someone I'm looking forward to seeing play there next month is Steve Poltz. I'm not sure any video can capture how mind-blowing Poltz is live — he's as much performance artist, comedian,  faith healer and spirit channeler as songwriter/guitarist — but this will have to do until you see him. Poltz tours a lot. (Bay Area heads up: He's in Berkeley in May and in SF in July.) Check him out.

Read.Eat.Listen: Art & Magic

The pursuit of truth and beauty through plumbing one's own line of particular inquiry is a road I trust, even if it's fairly unmarked. I've been neck deep in a bunch of projects this month, while planning a whole course on getting projects done, so I was pleased to be tagged on Facebook as part of an artist challenge earlier this week. The challenge is to post your work 5 days in a row and tag two other artists while you were at it. Already on day 5, I realized I've a lot more folks I want to tag! Oh my! 

In the meantime, I flew up to Portland for a few days, mainly to spend more time for my sweetie whose been traveling a lot, and also to enjoy that hyper-creative city. It was raining, and cold for most of my visit, but the trip started beautifully, with a view of a rainbow over the Willamette River, and ended sweetly with a big slice of gluten-free berry pie, with a good helping of quality time with my husband, yoga practice, good coffee, writing sessions and catching up with friends who live there. I got back in touch with a dear and brilliant artist, Kitty Wallis, who I knew years ago in Santa Cruz, while in town. She was already a master colorist when I first met her and I'm lucky to own a couple of her pieces. What a delight it was to see her current, just that much more realized work! If you're in Portland, look her up and seek her out. She's also continuing to teach her vivid and inspired approach to painting. 

Read: I've pretty much designed my life to be surrounded by creatives.  So I love coming upon this book:  Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers, by Janet Malcom. 
Eat: I ate out a lot this week, in Portland, at home, for Easter. I'm grateful for all the good food, and happy to see spring is busting out on menus in the form of an abundance of artichoke and asparagus based and laced dishes. Artichoke and asparagus on pizza, artichoke ragout under poached fish, artichoke grilled with x on top, asparagus on goat-cheese ravioli, asparagus lightly with brown butter...you get the idea. Go green I say!
Listen: With a name like,  Sister Sparrow & The Dirty Birds, how can I not want to listen? Love the sass and soul of this group. Check out Mama Knows: 

Read.Eat.Listen: On the Trail

I don't see that many movies in the theater anymore. Nor do I watch TV much. So the effect on my brain of seeing a movie in a theater and watching the Super Bowl during the same week remains to be seen. I do know I came home from the Super Bowl in a bad mood (and not because I was leaning more toward Seattle). All those wacky commercials, and Katy Perry's fun, if dizzying, half-time show were fine (I think?), but the fact of watching a brawl break out...well,  I'm not desensitized enough anymore.

This wasn't the case with Wild, the movie starring Reese Witherspoon, based on Cheryl Strayed's excellent book of the same name. Albeit, I was a little emotionally worked by the end, too.

It's been in theaters a couple months now, but I finally saw Wild last week. I loved Wild, the book, about a woman finding her way up from the bottom by hiking the Pacific Crest Trail solo. As a writer whose found a lot of solace in nature, including some of the wilderness Strayed's route travels, I ate the book up in a few sittings. It's a great story, and Strayed is a great writer and its no wonder the book was a bestseller. So I shied away from seeing the movie when it first was released. But there was nothing for me to worry about in the 'oh, I wished I stayed with the good memory of the book.' Reese and crew captured the story very well as well as its tear jerking affect. 

Read: I was talking to some writer friends about how working on projects — be they stories, short or long, or anything creative, really — involves letting them work on you. So I loved-loved-loved reading this profile of Yitang Zhang, "The Pursuit of Beauty," a genius problem--solving mathematician in the New Yorker. 
A snippet on how Zhang stays on the trail of problems: "A few years ago, Zhang sold his car, because he didn’t really use it. He rents an apartment about four miles from campus and rides to and from his office with students on a school shuttle. He says that he sits on the bus and thinks. Seven days a week, he arrives at his office around eight or nine and stays until six or seven. The longest he has taken off from thinking is two weeks. Sometimes he wakes in the morning thinking of a math problem he had been considering when he fell asleep. Outside his office is a long corridor that he likes to walk up and down. Otherwise, he walks outside."

Eat: Some weeks, I derived most of my protein from Almond Butter. I can't say this is the best thing (I know it could be worse) but almond butter prices have been a bit of a drag. So I've been looking into making my own. Here's the (not-so) skinny on that: HomeMade Raw Almond Butter.

Listen: Bjork has been getting plenty of press for her newest, Vulnicura, CD. And well, heck, its Bjork!!!

Read.Eat.Listen: Hunkering Down

Summer is over. I know that's a ridiculous statement in late October, but this past week I really felt it. In part, because I was in the mountains, in Truckee, for a gig and a night, at elevation. There, at close to the 6,000 ft, the temperature dips to freezing and below most nights, and the aspen trees have long since changed color, and I remembered, duh,  seasons. "The shoulder season" our host, a long-time resident called this weekend, between the bright summer when mountain bikes and hikers head for the trails and the snow-filled, skier-drawing winter. Still the bars were full, and while the thin air called for slightly different singing strategies (mainly a lot more water),  I felt the history of mountain living in my skin, camping in the Sierra, waking up to icicles dripping from the eaves in Boulder, and felt placed. I don't know I'll ever call a mountain town home long-term again, but there is nothing like the clear signifier of weather on lifestyle that comes with high elevation and its atmospheric changeability.
Fortunately, for my personal need for a sense of seasons and place, and more importantly for the California water-table, it rained twice, at home, at sea level, over the course of five days. We saw fit to relight the pilot light and I've made like a bear for a couple days of long naps, extended sleep, and actual book reading.

Read: Tracks, by Robyn Davidson. When I was a kid, I lived for the arrival of certain periodicals, especially the pink section of the SF Chronicle and the monthly delivery of National Geographic magazine. It's hard to imagine one news source having such an impact in this day of everything-at-your-fingertips, but National Geographic was formative for me: articles on Egypt and bird migration and native peoples of countries whose names I couldn't pronounce. One issue included an article about a woman who crossed the Australian desert, alone save for several camels. I was mesmerized by the pictures of her riding the animals, encrusted with flies, drinking out of streams and finally, reaching and wading into the Indian ocean. I think I read that article again and again, and then...forgot about it. Last week, a fellow-hawk watcher told me the story had been made into a movie. Instead of going to the theater, I bought the book and have been feeling like that National Geo-reading kid again.
Eat: Chances are I was eating a grilled cheese sandwich made with white bread, cheddar and lots of butter while I was reading those National Geographics. This many years later, I rarely east dairy or bread, but that doesn't mean the charms and comfort of grilled cheese have been lost to me. I ordered such a sandwich after a gig recently and nearly swooned from pleasure.  It wasn't vegan or gluten free but this one is: Basil Butternut Grilled Cheese. OMG!

Listen: Really enjoying what I'm hearing from Frazey Ford's latest "Indian Ocean." Recorded in Memphis with Al Green’s band, The Hi Rhythm Section, at her back, its makes for another sumptuous, if aural, feast.

Al Green’s band, The Hi Rhythm Section

Read.Eat.Listen: Island State

Read:  Though I was hard pressed to wander to far from the beach on my visit, there's a more to Hawaii beyond the sand and teaming tourists. Written in 1866 (!), nearly a century before it became a state,  "Mark Twain in Hawaii: Roughing It in the Sandwich Islands: Hawaii in the 1860s by Mark Twain captures Hawaii when it was still a kingdom yet in the process of getting colonized ...and all the complexity inherent in a collisions of cultures the state still exhibits: "Nearby is an interesting ruin--the meager remains of an ancient temple--a place where human sacrifices were offered up in those old bygone days...long, long before the missionaries braved a thousand privations to come and make [the natives] permanently miserable by telling them how beautiful and how blissful a place heaven is, and how nearly impossible it is to get there; and showed the poor native how dreary a place perdition is and what unnecessarily liberal facilities there are for going to it; showed him how, in his ignorance, he had gone and fooled away all his kinsfolk to no purpose; showed him what rapture it is to work all day long for fifty cents to buy food for next day with, as compared with fishing for a pastime and lolling in the shade through eternal summer, and eating of the bounty that nobody labored to provide but Nature. How sad it is to think of the multitudes who have gone to their gaves in this beautiful island and never knew there was a hell." — Mark Twain
Eat: Acai berries are native to Trinidad,  and Acai bowls originated in Brazil, but given how omnipresent the latter are on Hawaii breakfast menus, you'd think the antioxidant packed berry was an Aloha original. I'm not complained about having eaten so many acai bowls — which combines the best aspects of superfruit smoothie, fresh fruit and crunch —  last week. I became partial to those layered with raw granola and topped with local honey. Ascension Kitchen offers a good guide to composing one at home.

Listen: I've been playing Jenny's Lewis's The Voyager (produced by Ryan Adams) nonstop. This song encapsulated her fresh, rocking sound and humor ...as well as what it's like travel in popular vacation destinations:

Read.Eat.Listen: Full

Read: The dear writing-group friend LJ recommended 'Things I Don't Want to Know: On Writing' by Deborah Levy and I ate all but all of it up on the flights to and fro LA a couple weeks back. A free night looms and I'm about to devour the rest. Any writer/creative sort will appreciate her eye for detail, hard-stories-to-write-when-it's you material. This books isn't so much about how to write rather than the mysterious why we write (her chapters are titled 'Political Purpose' 'Historical Impulse' 'Sheer Egoism' and 'Aesthetic Enthusiasm.'

Eat: Oakland's Eat Real Festival is a foodie's dream (9/19 – 9/21) Oakland Local -  This weekend marks one of the quintessential Bay Area foodie events of the year as the 6th annual Eat Real Festival sets up in Jack London ...

I was one of the musical acts at the first year of the big foodie shindig that is theEat Real Festival. I'm returning to play at Jack London Square during the party this coming Saturday, Sept. 20.  Look/listen for us  2:30-3:30pm on the Lot Stage. There will be plenty to eat. I'll report back on what I actually ingest while there.

Listen: I'm a sucker for the ever-prolific, heart-on-his sleeve,  perhaps 'hard'-songs-to-write/writing-them-anyway truth-telling badassery of Ryan Adams whose got plenty new music with which to fill one's ears.

Read.Eat.Listen: Time & Beauty

Lucky me was afforded a couple of days at a lovely spa hotel where I went somewhat off the grid. It's amazing how much of what I think is necessary isn't when I can unplug a bit. It's amazing how much beauty gives to the mind, body and soul. S p a c e opens. Yes!
Read: The latest Murakami is out, I'm reminded, by none other than Patti Smith in her recent NY Times review "Deep Chords: Hurui Murakami's 'Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.  Buying the book will be due diligence but reading her review is a different kind of fun.
Eat:   Though I think the days may be numbered for doing so, I do eat fish. Cold water fish just nourishes. This is a very simple and yummy recipe for pan-fried salmon: Quick & Easy Balsamic Salmon
Listen: I put on some R&B/Soul by SF fave Quinn Devaux today. It will cure what ails you: 

Read.Eat.Listen: Time and Distance

I've been spending more time in SF proper more the past week than I have in a while so I'm really getting how quickly the place is changing.  New multi-story apartments, new restaurants, harder-than ever-to-find parking, but nonetheless beautiful as ever... When I moved 5+ years ago it was 'just across the bay' but driving across SF today I felt like I really moved a lot further away, like a stranger in a strange town. Plus it was super sunny. No fog in sight. Weird, but kind of cool, too. 
Read:  Waking the Buddha, by Clark Strand. After reading an interview with Strand on how he made his way from Zen to Nichiren's Buddhism, I had to get this book. Strand, a former Zen Monk and contributing editor to Tricycle, applies his scholarship to cover the SGI's remarkable and rapid growth with both rigor and heart. Good stuff ‘What the SGI has discovered isn’t just a new form of Buddhism. It’s a new way of being.' —Clark Strand in Waking the Buddha. Good stuff.
Eat: It's broiling hot. Who can think of food? Well, I usually don't forget for long. I had a simple satisfying smoothie @ Jane the other day composed of "organic kale, spinach, green apple, cucumber and lemon blended together with a drop of agave."  You can make it at home super quick. Yes. 
Listen: Conor Oberst - Time Forgot (Upside Down Mountain) I was taking advantage of NPR's First Listen to give Oberst's latest a listen... and this lyric caught my hear and kind of stopped me:
"They say everyone has a choice to make/To be loved or to be free/I told you once I felt invisible/And I guess by now you see/That what I meant is I’m not all there until I finally leave."

Read.Eat.Listen: Edgy

After using the word 'edgy' to describe work I liked at last week's house concert (which was great, thank you Self & Soul Center), someone asked me what I was implying. By edgy I didn't mean irritable rather than innovative. I meant someone who knew the less shiny parts of living — the contradictions, the uncomfortable truths, the heartbreak, cravings, nameless itches and all-too-blatant injustices — and didn't turn away, but felt it, and made art of it, maybe, rather than medicating or sugar-coating or otherwise denying the real.

There's a lot of uncomfortable truth going on right now and I appreciate those willing to go to the edges more than ever. Perhaps I should take a break from reading the news, so full of more of the failings of humans (Everest, South Korea, the bigot in Nevada), rather than the triumphs, but I don't want to deny it either. Challenging and painful as forging something new can often be, creativity lives and breathes by the truth, not ignorance.

Read:  I've taken a couple of workshops with wisdom teacher and writer Deena Metzger and always felt empowered at the possibility of effecting change and transformation through story afterward. To fix my current trip-up, I'm turning to her Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing and From Grief Into Vision: A Council  today.

 "There is a silence that is the heart of God. And there is another kind of silence that kills. We were shattered when we came home from Africa, but also we had been restored. We had been broken down, we had been reconstituted. Story can do this; it can take the sharp slivers and the shards and organize them into a light. This is a book or it is letter or it is a long conversation. A memoir, a series of stories, a meditation on despair and beauty and hope. A book of healing...."

Eat: Gluten-free and living in the Bay Area and missing the satisfaction that a good piece of bread can give? A lot of GF bread is not good--gummy, bland, not-all-that-easy-to-digest for its poorly proportioned mix of GF flours. Then a friend turned me onto Bread Srsly, a SF-based company that delivers most of its wares by bike! Very cool people behind this operation and their GF sourdough bread rocks. Plus they now ship. 

Listen: Hurray for the Riff Raff, née Alynda Lee Segarra, a New Orleans based artist, has the edge and the soul going on:

Read.Eat.Listen: Regeneration

I was dismayed, heartened, inspired and confused by the latest report by the UN on Climate Change. Dismayed that things are as bad as they are; heartened that experts are not shying away from the truth; inspired by the possibilities for taking action and confused at how and where to start on the individual level. The upshot is, of course, there's no more time to waste when it comes to taking action to slow climate change and no more excuses to be made: climate change is a man-made problem. We've a couple more decades, if that, to halt or slow the crisis. This lifetime. Right now. Where to begin when the problems — from fossil fuel use, to fracking, to plastics in the ocean, to rampant development —  have such momentum? Fortunately, there are many people on it. Now it's our turn to listen and believe that what we do today affects tomorrow and  that the affect can be beneficial. Toward that end, I've been so encouraged to see all the footage of hatching Peregrines from the 'nest-cams' set up around the Bay Area. By the 1970s, the Peregrine was an Endangered Species, a victim of rampant pesticide use, but with diligent efforts by biologists and a ban on DDT use, the falcon population recovered. Thirty years of combined legislation and action works. Now look at them go: 

Read: Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior, a takes on climate change in novel form. "Flight Behavior is a brilliant and suspenseful novel set in present day Appalachia; a breathtaking parable of catastrophe and denial that explores how the complexities we inevitably encounter in life lead us to believe in our particular chosen truths." 
Plus, this article: UN Climate Report Charts Ways to Halt Global Warming

Eat: An afternoon snack at Piccino in Dogpatch the other day entailed a spring soup made with butter beans. Butter Beans, or Fava Beans, are those large, lovely kidney shaped beans that look engineered for presentation possibilities. They're also yummy. I've got my eye on this easy breezy spring salad of Fava Beans with Red Onion and Mint.

Listen: I've been on an Over the Rhine jag most of the year, I admire The Lone Bellow and I've been a fan of eTown since the 90s when I lived in Boulder and watched many a live taping. So I was delighted to see this Over the Rhine/Lone Bellow/eTones rendition of Slip Sliding Away. Beauty. Yes.

At the Roots: Music, Matthiessen & Earth Day Marin

©Dave Perkes photo, http://www.peaceofangkorphoto.com/

The weekend was punctuated by hearing a bunch of great music, attending and playing a tune at the Earth Day Marin Celebration and learning of the passing of writer and naturalist Peter Matthiessen.
Friday, we waved goodbye to a songwriter-friend who is moving across the country and then got ourselves to Lafayette's Lamorinda Music Store for "3 Voices in Song," an evening with songwriters Wendy Beckerman, Louise Taylor and Karen Almquist. Wendy is the ringleader of a 'songwriter's exchange' we've been participating in for years. I've written about 'song group' before — a regular, grassroots gathering of diverse songwriters who come together to share a meal, their latest work and feedback — as it powerfully and stealthily became a trusted sounding board for many of my songs.

The trio's show at Lamorinda displayed the long-time friends' musical mastery. This wasn't flashy or trendy music, it was real and heart-filled music by dedicated artists. Three-part harmonies, blues riffs, delicate finger-picking... a great expanse of musical range and heart. Everyone had a firm command of their instruments and the joy they were taking in playing together was palpable. Wendy has a finely tuned sensibility for melody and meaning. When she isn't writing songs, she's teaching mindfulness classes: her songs are exacting, excellent and poetic. Karen, a kick-ass guitar player and self-proclaimed song 'interpreter', covered Jesse Winchester and early James Taylor, offered up several beautiful originals and added some cooking harmonica to the mix. Louise Taylor, also new to me, is a longtime troubadour who calls Hawaii home and wields a hollow-body Duesenburg guitar with the confident swagger of a gunslinger. Only it's her voice which is the real weapon. When she's not writing and performing, she's a voice teacher so...think Bonnie Raitt's long-lost sister. It was a truly nourishing night of authentic and highly skilled music. 

You think that would have been enough but ...we had tickets to Gurf Morlix house concert presented by KC Turner on Saturday night.  As a longtime devotee of Lucinda Williams and lover of Austin music, I'd heard Gurf's name a long while: he accompanied Williams for 11 years, and produced her first two albums (also co-writing one of my favorite Williams' tunes ,'Big Red Sun Blues'), but that's just a note in a long and storied career. As well as being a sought-after producer, he's a master guitar player and to-the-bone honest songwriter in the tradition of Townes Van Zandt, Nebraska-era Bruce Springsteen and Blaze Foley (to whom he pays homage to live and in multiple recordings). Sitting back in a living room and hearing him sing and play a small-body guitar accompanied by singer-songwriter Amilia Spicer on vocals, I was musically transported to South Austin, and lyrically transported to the back roads of Texas where the living is hard and choices life or death. Again, a night of real-deal music.

Right before we left the house for the Gurf show, I learned that writer and naturalist Peter Matthiessen had passed. Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard was required reading for any self-respecting Environmental Studies major at UCSC. As a nature loving,  aspiring writer undergrad, I ate up that landmark book, as well as, in subsequent years,  his many New Yorker essays and writings on Buddhism and nature through the years. His words are steeped in integrity. When I had the privilege of meeting him in person after hearing him speak in SF a while back, I was struck by his immense heart and exacting presence. Reading his obituary and the many, recently penned tributes  (he has a new book that's set to be released tomorrow),  I'm struck again by his dedication to truth and activism: "it’s our duty [as writers] to speak for those who can’t speak for themselves."
Mostly, I'm reminded it's a privilege to read and to write, period.
On that note, while a contest is somewhat antithetical to the spirit of the artists mentioned above, I was nonetheless honored to have a song co-written with Kwame Copeland, "Your Own Reaction," chosen as a finalist in the Earth Day Marin Song Contest. And despite my cold-compromised voice, we ventured to Larkspur for a full day in the sun, listening to many speakers and musicians who are actively working on behalf of the environment and sustainable living, and performing our song. Marin residents are truly leaders on this front, and I was impressed with the effort made by producer Hannah Doress to pull the various organization and events together to share their knowledge and activism.  Kudos, Hannah!
Alas, our song did not win the grand prize (and a recording of it is just getting mixed so I can't post it) but I hope its message will add to the effort to make the world a better place:  

"Start your own reaction/See what you can do"

Read.Eat.Listen: Surrender

Seemingly out of nowhere this week, I came down with a 24-hour-ish bug and ended up canceling two-days worth of my oh-so-carefully made plans. Poof! I didn't go out of the house for a day and (mostly) unplugged. Kind of a drag and kind of a blessing at the same time. Today, everything was so vivid, the sun coming out after rain rendered the sky that much more blue, sprouting seedlings in the garden that much more green, that I felt grateful for the enforced break from it all. It's really easy for me to get busy, to try too hard, to try to figure it all out now, when the truth of the matter is I only have a certain amount of control over events.  The benefit of getting sick is how easy it makes it to stop — thinking too much, doing too much, whatever — and listening.  I'm reminded that surrender is not about giving up or giving in, it's simply about stopping the fight.

Read: Yay, it's national poetry month. There's a nice blog "A Year of Being Here" that features a mindfulness poem each day. One recent entry from poet Chris Forhan:

"Joy"  
It seized me—never mind the circumstance: sudden
scent in the breeze like cinnamon, sun silvering
a roof as the unicycle parade began—it seized me

as sickness does, wholly, with no mercy,
all of my body obeisant to its law as though none of it
were mine, finally: not the joy or the body. —Chris Forhan

Eat: Caldo aka hot soup. There's a Mexican restaurant in town, Acapulco, that does a kick-ass version, either veggie or with chicken, and its all I wanted to eat while under-the-weather. Here's a veggie version from Food 52. Simple, good, healing.

Listen: My pal and life-long music eductor Sally, gave me David Sylvian's 'Dead Bees on a Cake' on cassette many years ago (it was first released in 1999). Today I got in the car after yoga and heard one of the songs from that record, ' Krishna Blue,' and recalled how great that CD was. I also remembered another song on Dead Bees that fit the day: "I Surrender."

Read.Eat.Listen: Greats

Read: I'm on another Alice Munro binge 'Dear Life: Stories' as she's so wickedly straightforwardly and great at making the ordinary extraordinary.
"'Accept everything and then tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens anyway, and you're just there, going along easy in the world.'

Now good-bye.

I see what he meant. It really is the right thing to do. But, in my mind, Caro keeps running at the water and throwing herself in, as if in triumph, and I'm still caught, waiting for her to explain to me, waiting for the splash." from Gravel in 'Dear Life'.

Eat: The call for my birthday? Tapas at Duende Restaurant & Bodega in Oakland. I love this place for its vibe, its jazz-leaning music calendar, it's Verve-coffee serving bodega and now, dinner. This was one of the best meals I've had lately, and I've been generally eating well. Highlights included the octupus and the verduras de invierno, a Tempranillo 'duet' and a sublime almond cake.  

Listen: The great Lucinda Williams just reissued her landmark self-titled album from 1988. This live track finds her playing the entirety and talking about the songs at a show in Nashville.

 

Read.Eat.Listen: Trophies & Icons

When I was in grade school, my class was shown a cautionary film about extinction (mind you this was Santa Cruz during the 70s). I don't remember much else about the movie other than a scene of mystified children walking through a dusty museum full of taxidermied bears and fox, snakes and raccoons. The children in this movie, set far into the future, didn't recognize the animals, which were known to me and the rest of my class. This really got me. How? Why? What? I liked the fact, growing up in a somewhat rural area, that I knew live animals and their environments to some degree, not just vestiges.  The movie did its job and laid another brick in the foundation of my appreciation of nature. Which is why the implications of the California drought, and then happening upon a seemingly randomly-placed wall full of trophy animals has gotten stuck in my craw of late.

Unbeknownst to me prior to last week, a roadside restaurant along Highway 5 houses a large collection of trophy animals including three polar bears (!), moose heads and pronghorn antelope. We'd stopped for some road food and whatever pie we could find. Upon procuring the latter (in a bit of foreshadowing, a slice of 'Fruits of the Forest' mixed berry pie), we stepped into the cafe/bar side of Granzella's and.. stopped in our tracks: covering the high-ceilinged walls were hundreds of deer, elk and moose heads plus stuffed pheasant, pin-tail ducks and other birds.
'What the.... " We shuddered. Most people in the restaurant weren't evening looking at the stuffed animals.  I flashed on the grade-school movie. I Googled Trophy Animals & the restaurant name to get up to speed. I couldn't really find much other than the collection belonged to the owner of the restaurant. But I did fidd some other, unsettling, information about the practice of trophy hunting from In Defense of Animals. 
Some tips from their site:
What you can do:

• Contact IDA if you are interested in helping to end trophy hunting.
• Before you vote for a legislative representative, find out if he/she is supportive of trophy hunting, canned hunts or even involved in the killing of “big game” or any exotic animals. If yes, do not vote for this person!
• Before booking a safari in foreign countries, make sure the outfitting company does not endorse safari hunts and has no ties to any trophy hunting organization such as the Safari Club International and others.

Read: We came home from a gig Monday to the sad news of Pete Seeger's death and my wind down for the evening was reading his obit. Every songwriter, folk or otherwise, has felt the ripple of Seeger's influence. Reading the news reports and the many tributes, I was struck by what I knew but was once again wowed by: his resolute and fearless activism. What a model for us all.  Alec Wilkinson expanded on his New Yorker profile of Seeger to write The Protest Singer: An Intimate Portrait of Pete Seeger.

Eat: On our tour through the Northwest, I was on a quest for the best gluten free bread and found a good representative at Hideaway Bakery in Eugene (note they had a ton of non-GF bread too). Back at home, I've been scratching me head at my options, but have come across some good quick-bread recipes, including this dessert-like one for Date Bread w/Coffee and Ginger from Healthy & Seasonal Recipes. Yum.

Listen: Pete Seeger sings This Land is Your Land: