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Tickets available at all Dimple Records Locations, The Beat Records, and Armadillo Records, or purchase by phone @ 916.443.9202 2

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SN&R | 02.27.14

February 27, 2014 | vol. 25, issue 46

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Put down the popcorn Last week, I finally completed season two of Scandal on Netflix. As soon as I binge-watch my way through the rest of the addictive political drama, I plan to succumb to House of Cards and Sherlock before finally catching up on Portlandia, The Killing and Damages. That should be enough to tide me over until the next season of Orange Is the New Black finally premieres in June.

My inner couch potato is, obviously, relieved that Netflix just reached a deal with Comcast to ensure its TV shows and movies be streamed without interruption.

The rest of me, however, is very, very nervous.

The news comes on the heels of Comcast’s plan to buy Time Warner Cable, thus making it the cable provider of choice to nearly one-third of U.S. households, and the high-speed Internet provider for nearly 40 percent of those same homes.

The Federal Communications Commission will likely examine that latter deal to determine whether it stifles competition among cable and Internet providers. The FCC should also put a careful eye to the Comcast-Netflix agreement, because it may mean a possible violation of the Net-neutrality principles that stipulate that the government, ISPs and businesses not impose access restrictions on consumers.

The Comcast-Netflix deal is, theoretically, about better service, not restrictions. Ultimately, however, we’d be foolish not see the possibility for a future, disturbing standard: Someone has to pay for instant, glitch-free access to Crazy Eyes, Red and Miss Claudette. Netflix may be ponying up now, but put down the popcorn and open your eyes.

Fewer competitors means that the bill, as well a continued stranglehold on choice and availability, will soon come due for the rest of us.

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“I had to confront a bunch of teenagers who would not stop talking.”

Asked at the MARRS building in Midtown:

What is your movie-theater pet peeve?

Cheyne Rowe

Bryson Fox

Adam Sheehan

student

computer-business consultant

In an empty theater, someone still manages to sit next to me. It always happens to me.

I don’t like going to movies when they’re really popular.

I saw The Hobbit about a month after it came out, and someone still managed to sit right next to me. The theater was empty, and they sat right in front of me.

I don’t like people who shush when it’s loud, because we have a lot of kids, and sometimes they make noise. It happens kind of often. There’s only so much I can do: They’re little kids having a good time. We got shushed in Thor: The Dark World, but I guess that’s an adult movie.

Kathleen Justad

student

Cheyenne Viola

project manager

I am everyone else’s movie-theater pet peeve.

I’m always making commentary at the screen.

I’m opinionated, so if there’s something I have to say, I’m going to say it. Or I laugh during scary movies when someone dies. It’s what I do. I’m constantly inappropriate.

Nyenbeku George

student

A year ago, I had to confront a bunch of teenagers who would not stop talking. At this point, I don’t even go to movies anymore unless it’s a kids’ movie where I couldn’t care less who’s yelling and talking. If it’s something I’m interested in, I’d rather watch it at home.

sociology professor

When people leave all their food and stuff, it’s annoying. There’s a garbage can right outside!

Just take it! Make the other people’s job easier.

It bugs me. I don’t like messy people.

People on their cellphones and showing up late and loud, simultaneously.

It’s been a while since I encountered it. The only time it happens consistently is if it’s opening day for a high-profile pop-culture movie, more in the superhero movies.

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Email your letters to sactoletters@newsreview.com.

Kings own the city Re “Arena addicted” (SN&R Editorial, February 20): I did attend the State of the City event.

Two things I came away with: Kevin Johnson is a great public letteR of speaker, no matter the week what you think of what he has to say. The second is that the city is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Sacramento Kings.

Dan Allison

S acr am en t o

Forget Sacto— do events in West Sac Re “City of fees” by Nick Miller (SN&R Editor’s Note, February 20): Why is this a mystery that it’s so expensive to host an event in Sacramento? Governments use fees and red tape to discourage behavior, as we see when our Legislature proposes 10,000-percent taxes on ammunition.

What should happen in Sacramento is to zone areas for events and allow suitable facilities to host events as a part of their normal, everyday business. The

tax-and-fee scheme discourages nonprofits and low-revenue businesses from holding such events—and maybe that was the idea all along. Perhaps people should just hold their events in West Sacramento, where special-event permits only cost as much as $50. Clearly, West Sacramento is far more interested in a vibrant music and arts scene than this “world-class city” that is home to a basketball team that is so awesome they have to be put up in public housing.

Peter Finn Sacramento

Detroit Kings?

Re “Arena addicted” (SN&R Editorial, February 20): Having been born and raised in Sacramento, I resent the boondoggle that is being shoved down the throats of Sacramentans. Knowing full well it is against the will of the majority of citizens, the proponents are doing everything within their power to avoid a vote on the subject. This is not representative government—and is the way Detroit fell into such dire circumstances. There are a few that will make a bundle at the expense of Sacramento taxpayers if worse comes to worst.

Robert Carroll Elk Grove

McKinley misinformation Re “No passage” by Nick Miller (SN&R News, February 13): I’m really rather appalled at the amount of misinformation being disseminated about this project. No one has ever called for a “nearly $30 million” tunnel. But neighbors did ask for two-way vehicle access at Alhambra Boulevard, which is both economically and technically feasible.

The developer’s response was to produce this estimate of $28 millionplus for a plan that is technically infeasible. And he’s right, that’s a “nonstarter.” But no one asked for that.

The developer has claimed that Union Pacific Railroad won’t stop the trains to build an underpass at Alhambra. He’s right, they won’t. But no one asked for that.

SN&R states in the story that the underpass would, according to “both city and private estimates, cost at least $28.6 million.” The city got the estimate from the developer: That is not an independent assessment and should not be reported as such. No one ever asked for a $30 million tunnel except the developer.

In Merced, they recently built a railway underpass for $12.5 million, with four traffic lanes and room for six,

as well as bike and pedestrian access.

And it is beautiful. If Merced can do it, why can’t we?

Steven Swindel Sacramento

Does McKinley developer even care?

Re “No passage” by Nick Miller (SN&R News, February 13): Having finally gotten a researched answer to how much it would cost the developer of the proposed McKinley Village to provide vehicle access to the development via Alhambra Boulevard, i.e., upward of $20 million, the question now is how much profit the development with Alhambra access would generate and whether that would satisfy the developers?

As proposed, with no vehicle access via Alhambra, it seems clear that the developer doesn’t give a rip about either the people who live here now or the ones who might choose to live between the railroad tracks and the freeway.

This proposal, without the Alhambra access, is premature, and only the developer’s pursuit of profit calls for it to be approved.

Michael Greene via email

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Beer Week events Thursday February 27Th Beer Week Eve Party All day, come have a pint and

saTurday March 1sT Speakeasy Funky Fedora Party Celebrate under-

Friday February 28Th Anchor Gold Rush Party Help us kick off beer week

sunday March 2nd New Belgium “Capture a Snapshot” Enjoy New

help us make room for all the new beers going on draft for Beer Week. Every time a keg blows a new beer comes on draft! $1 Miller High Life draft all beer week long, $2 Coors/Coors Light Bud/Bud Light and Pabst Bottles all beer week long, awesome craft beers $3.50 a pint

49er style like when Anchor was first made, 7pmclose. Costumes encouraged, Anchor goodies will be given out, $5 keep the glass $3.50 refills, Squeeze Inn food truck @ 5:30 pm FEATuRED BEERS: Anchor Steam, Anchor California Lager, Anchor IPA, Anchor Saison, Anchor Bock

ground style at this prohibition themed Fedora party.

Wear a Fedora and get a free Speakeasy glass, 6-9pm, Taco Azteca Food Truck @ 1:30 pm FEATuRED BEERS: Speakeasy Prohibition Ale, Speakeasy Metropolis Lager, Speakeasy Black Hand Milk Stout

Belgium’s newly released Snapshot Wheat while having a blast getting your photos taken in the New Belgium Photo Booth, 2pm-5pm. $5 keep the glass $4 refills, Sacatomatoes Food Truck @ 1:30 pm FEATuRED BEERS: New Belgium Snapshot Wheat, New Belgium Fate Tire Amber. Also featuring Special New Belgium Globe Glassware

Monday March 3rd Sierra Nevada Hoppy Beer for Hoppy People!

Relax and enjoy the assortment of different hops from Sierra Nevada. Hop Tutorial with a representative from Sierra Nevada brewery, 5pm-Close. $4 keep the glass $3.50 refills, Wicked Wich @ 5:30pm.

FEATuRED BEERS: Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, Sierra Nevada Ruthless Rye, Sierra Nevada 291 Harvest Single IPA, Sierra Nevada Black IPA

Tuesday March 4Th Coronado Fat Tuesday Feast on beer with us for this

Coronado style Mardi Gras Party. Beer and beads a plenty! Dress up and get a free pint glass!

5pm-8pm, Taco Azteca Food Truck @ 5:30pm FEATuRED BEERS: Coronado Mermaid Red, Coronado Orange Ave Wit, Coronado Baltic Porter

Thursday March 6Th Crispin & Fox Barrel Cider Taste all of our featured

ciders with the best of all worlds…A Cider Flight! $12 to get a sampling off all four Ciders, 5pm-Close. $5 keep the glass $4 refills, Squeeze Inn Food Truck @ 5:30pm FEATuRING: Crispin, Crispin Honey, Fox Barrel, Hilltop Special Cider

Friday March 7Th North Coast Brewing

Mini Tap Takeover featuring five of North Coast’s best beers, 8pm-11pm. Drewski’s Food Truck @ 5:30pm, $5 keep the glass $4 refills FEATuRED BEERS: Scrimshaw Pilsner, Old Rasputin Porter, Brother Thelonius, Prankster Belgian Gold, North Coast Anniversary Saison

saTurday March 8Th Celebrate Sacramento Day! All Day, wear purple to

support our Kings and get $1 off featured beers.

All beers featured made by local breweries.

Squeeze Inn Food Truck @ 5:30pm BREWERIES FEATuRED: New Helvetia, Rusthaller, Track 7, Two Rivers Cider, Rubicon

sunday March 8Th Hilltop’s Annual Beer Week Ping Pong Tournament in honor of Roy Zattiero

Beer Blowout Madness! Tournament starts @ 11:30 am, $15 sign up fee, $1 off all featured beers from players, Wicked Wich Food Truck @ 1:30pm

Wednesday March 5Th Green Flash Pint Night $5 keep the glass $4 refills

FEATuRED BEERS: West Coast IPA, Saison Tart, Hop Odyssey, Palate Wrecker, Tons of Green Flash goodies

NOLAN’S HILLTOP TAVERN 48 TH & FOLSOM BLVD | SACRAMENTO, CA 8

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SN&R | 02.27.14

Journalism lives at UC Davis

See NEWS

11

See GREENLIGHT

14

BEe

illuStration by Hayley DoSHay

Singles barred

10

Issues?

What issues?

R

See NEWS

Ride an ambulance, save Sacto

The real story on how Sacramento banned craft beer It’s Sacramento Beer Week 2014—but a hangover from the 1990s still bans the sale of single by bottles of craft beer in the city.

Nick Miller This unique-to-Sacramento policy dates back to 1996, when the city council ni ck am@ newsr evie w.c om wanted two things when it came to booze in the city: more control over liquor-license applications; and increased tools to combat blight and crime due to drunks, loitering and littering.

This lead to the approval of a new liquor-license ordinance in October of that year. But there was an unexpected casualty: single bottles of craft beer.

Since then, there’s been debate over whether to allow “singles” to be sold in areas like the central city. City leaders have been wary to make changes.

But now, former council members who voted for the ban—and even city police—are recognizing that the antiquated law probably needs tweaking.

Before 1996, the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, which oversees liquor licenses in the state, had a moratorium on certain liquor permits because it considered many of this city’s neighborhoods “over-concentrated” with booze establishments. This included Midtown and downtown.

According to a September 1996 news story by Tony Bizjak in The Sacramento Bee, “city officials lobbied the state for the right to a local say on liquor license applications in neighborhoods already laden with liquor stores.” The Legislature passed a new law granting this power to local governments in 1994.

Two years later, the city was ready to change its laws. Under its new plan, “the Police Department would say yes or no to [liquor license] applicants based on a long list of City Council guidelines,” Bizjak wrote. Some of these rules addressed hours of operation and types of booze that could be sold. But one of the conditions restricted craft brew: “Sales of beer and malt beverages shall be in quantities of not less than a six pack.”

Back then, the modern craft-beer industry literally did not exist. One of today’s largest craft breweries, Stone Brewing Co. near San Diego, had just opened in 1996. Most beer was sold in six-packs. The majority of single bottles were low-cost 40-ouncers, or “forties,” that city leaders attributed to urban blight and crime.

BEFORE

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The city banned the sale of single brews in areas already laden with liquor stores in 1996—but an emerging craft-beer industry has lawmakers and law-enforcement rethinking the approach.

Deborah Ortiz, councilwoman at the time representing Oak Park, is often erroneously credited with leading the charge to ban craft-beer singles. This isn’t accurate: She ultimately voted for the ordinance, yes, but her motivation was to have more say over booze in her district.

“If the sales of singles in a certain area is not going to have the propensity to cause blight, then it’s no longer a publicsafety issue.”

Officer Doug Morse Sacramento Police Department spokesman Minutes from a September 3, 1996, council meeting note that “Ortiz stressed that it was important to have local control on this issue. … She said this was the City’s opportunity to tell ABC what it wanted in its neighborhoods.” There are no comments on the record about her ambition to ban beer.

In fact, her intent was to not prohibit certain high-end beer or wine shops. At a meeting on October 22, 1996, she asked staff whether the new rules would still allow for the opening of “a gourmet wine shop” or related business. Staff assured her yes.

STORY

Former associate city planner Dawn Holm also told the Bee in a story on that same day that the city wants “the option … of a gourmet wine shop. [But] a gourmet wine shop will have the same license as a liquor store,” and the ABC wasn’t granting any of those before the city changed its rules.

It raises the question: If the council didn’t intend to ban wine shops, are highend craft-beer bottle shops the accidental victims of this 18-year-old ordinance?

Would the council of 1996, if it could see the beer industry of today, still ban the sale of singles?

Ortiz wouldn’t go so far as to say the ordinance needs to be repealed; she says it’s no longer her place to make those decisions. But she did acknowledge to SN&R last week that “it’s a legitimate thing to say that was then and this is now,” and that today’s public-safety issues aren’t what they were in 1996.

“Today’s reality ... it’s a very different time and a very different place.”

It’s also a different craft-beer world.

Brew is now a $4 billion-plus industry in California, according to the California Craft Brewers Association, and a majority of the modern craft brew is sold as singles at high-end retail outlets such as City Beer Store in San Francisco or Ol Beercafe & Bottle Shop in Walnut Creek.

Even most of the region’s 30-plus breweries sell their beer in 22-ounce bottles, which are called bombers. These typically cost more than a traditional 40-ounce beer and attract a more discerning beer drinker.

In 1996, city leaders deliberated for weeks on the new booze policy and

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

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eventually passed it 9-0 on October 22.

Then-Councilman Darrell Steinberg and Steve Cohn, who remain local elected officials to this day, voted in favor.

Councilman Cohn has told SN&R in the past that a “refined approach” is probably needed to address the city’s singles rule.

Other current city leaders, including central city Councilman Steve Hansen, have shared with SN&R concerns over lifting the singles ban. They worry about public safety and also don’t want to have to create policy that differentiates between cheap beer and costlier craft beer.

The Sacramento Police Department— which actually makes decisions on these licenses—is open to a new approach.

“We’re trying to find the best way to deal with the sale of these craft beers, which are oftentimes sold in singles, and, typically, they are a little bit more expensive,” Officer Doug Morse, police spokesman, said last week.

So far, police have given special waivers to a handful of local businesses, such as the Sacramento Natural Foods Co-op and the proposed new BevMo! store in Midtown, to sell two-packs of beer, or “doubles.” The ordinance has yet to be amended to allow such exceptions, even though small changes were made as recently as April 2013. Morse says the department is trying to adapt to these “modern times.”

But he also said its No. 1 priority is still public safety. “But if the sales of singles in a certain area is not going to have the propensity to cause blight, then it’s no longer a public-safety issue.” Ω

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The news goes on

onLy $19.99

It looks like The California Aggie will live to see its 100th birthday, thanks to the thousands of UC Davis students who voted during campus elections last week. by Janelle Bitker The Aggie put a fee referendum on the ballot asking students to pay an extra $3.88 in student fees per quarter j a ne l le b @ —$3.10 to fund the student-run newspaper, plus a ne w s re v ie w.c o m 78 cent surcharge that goes to student aid. With 26,000 undergraduates and three quarters in an academic year, The Aggie would pocket roughly $300,000 per year. To pass, it needed a 20 percent voter participation, and at least two-thirds needed to vote “yes.”

Turns out, young people maybe do care about the news.

More than 27 percent of UC Davis undergraduates voted, and just shy of 73 percent voted in favor of the initiative. To those who have been away from college politics for a while, 27 percent may seem extremely apathetic, but it’s actually around 10 percent higher than usual, and more students voted on the fee referendum than on the student-government candidates. (For anyone interested, the guy in the fuzzy blue squid hat won. Go figure.)

The results were revealed in a campus lecture hall and the beyond-packed room cheered when the tally was announced, though the applause was nowhere near as crazy and screechy as when the president and vice president votes were displayed. The Aggie staff looked excited and relieved, but more than that, tired.

“I’m trying not to get my hopes up,” editor-in-chief Elizabeth With 26,000 Orpina said.

Woo, woo, woo! It passed! It’s undergraduates, over!

Right?

Wrong. The higher-ups still have The California final say on the matter. The Aggie Aggie would staff can’t touch the bill now—it pocket roughly goes to Chancellor Linda Katehi for a stamp of approval, with recommendaNEWS & REVIEW BUSINES $300,000 tions from the Division of Student DESIGNER ISSUE DATE Affairs. Then it goes to the University 06.18.09 per year. of California Office ofAL the President.

FILE NAME Orpina acknowledged that TRINITYCATHEDRAL061809R1 some aspects of the initiative are likely to change—little language things, a slight fee adjustment based on USP the (BOLD SELECTI PRICE / ATMOSPHERE / EXPER return-to-aid surcharge and a change in oversight committees. These were issues brought up by Milton Lang, the PLEASE CAREFULLY REVI university’s associate vice chancellor, ADVERTISEMENT and Tracy Bennett, AND VERIFY T the Student Affairs comptroller, during anADemergency SIZE (COLUMNS X INCHES) meeting to student-government leaders a couple of weeks SPELLING ago. Lang anticipates a speedy review from Katehi.

NUMBERS & DATES Normally, UCOP reviews fee referendums before CONTACT INFO (PHONE, ADDR they’re even voted on by students. But since UC Davis AD APPEARS AS REQUESTED officials didn’t get the bill language to UCOP in time, SN&R staff writer BY: Janelle Bitker is also that review will have to happen after theAPPROVED fact. Indeed, a former editor of The UC President Janet Napolitano has ultimate authority California Aggie. on the matter. UCOP spokesperson Brooke Converse said changes are “probably unlikely,” assuming the fee doesn’t break any UC systemwide rules.

If the measure moves through these channels with relatively little drama, The Aggie will then be tasked with following through on its plans—hiring a full-time business staff, printing twice a week and expanding its new-media program.

And, of course, paying themselves more than $2 per hour. Ω

Physical pain, city budget’s gain

BEATS

Sacramento officials to residents: Take more ambulance rides, get more parking tickets In Sacramento, it’s a ghoulish financial truth that what’s catastrophic for one of the city’s residents can be quite good for by municipal coffers.

Raheem Consider the brutal scene that F. Hosseini unfolded early on the morning of r aheemh@ February 17 in the Valley Hi-North newsreview.c om Laguna neighborhood: According to Sacramento Police Department logs, that’s where a woman later identified as Mercedes Ibarra-castro allegedly stabbed her female friend and the friend’s 14-year-old son after the youth apparently said something to upset Ibarra-castro. Both victims sustained major injuries, and the mother required an ambulance ride to the hospital.

Ka-ching.

For every ambulance transport the Sacramento Fire Department conducts, the city is owed an average of $1,700. (It collects only about $436 from private-insurance companies, Medicaid and the uninsured, but that’s another story.)

But a funny thing happened through the first six months of the 2013-2014 fiscal year, which ends in July: People stopped getting hurt.

According to internal figures, the department projects it’ll be down about a thousand ambulance rides from its annual clip of 36,000 transports. That dip, coupled with the city’s inflated revenue forecast, resulted in an anticipated shortfall of $1.6 million to the fire department’s “advanced life support” program, a recent midyear budget report revealed.

“We can’t induce people to take Critical emergency: A decrease in the ambulance more, and we don’t ambulance rides via want to,” interim Fire Chief Dan the Sacramento Fire Department could Haverty told SN&R. The bean counters at City Hall result in a major budget shortfall for have a slightly different take. the agency.

“I guess it’s a good thing if fewer people are being transported,” Councilman Steve Cohn said during a hearing on the city’s fiscal affairs on February 11.

“Well, I suppose that’s one way of looking at it,” said City Manager John Shirey. “Of course, it does affect our revenues.”

And how.

The shortages represent nearly half of a $2.17 million shortfall anticipated for the department by the end of the current fiscal year.

Additionally, the Department of Public Works eyed a $1 million deficit, resulting from a projected decrease in annual ticket citations, from 181,644 the previous fiscal year to 178,085 this one. Overall, the city has witnessed a 20 percent decline in issued parking tickets since 2009. That’s in line with what nine other top ticketing California cities experienced during the same period, according to the firm that manages them, Inglewood Citation Management Services.

For every ambulance transport the Sacramento Fire Department conducts, the city is owed an average of $1,700.

A city staff report conjectured that the economic downturn resulted in fewer incidents of illegal parking.

In an attempt to stem those losses, the city’s parking division plans to hire six additional enforcement officers to increase response times, procure up to 6,000 wireless smart meters that will make paying for parking easier, and cut the citation-review process from eight months to 90 days, the staff report states.

When it comes to the ambulance ride shortage, there’s nothing much the city can do but set aside money to cover the projected shortfall and hope.

Hugs, not stabs There is such a thing as an illegal hug, in case you were wondering.

The unwelcome show of intimacy went down during the evening of February 19, when a woman told Sacramento police she was clinched by a man she didn’t know. Officers found both parties on the 2700 block of P Street, close to Winn Park.

The woman declined to press charges, but the cops cuffed the hugger anyway on a public-intoxication charge, Sacramento Police Department logs show.

Police also contended with a trio of road rage incidents: On the 3500 block of Stockton Boulevard on February 18, police received reports of someone throwing soda cans at a person over a traffic dispute. And there were two separate incidents on February 11, including an argument that led to one motorist getting stabbed after the two squabbling drivers decided to pull over on Fairbanks Avenue.

No arrests were recorded in any of the incidents.

The weird week for police also featured what must be one of the oldest perps on record. On February 10, officers turned out to the 3400 block of 24th Avenue to serve a drugrelated arrest warrant on an 86-year-old man. Police found the octogenarian hiding in a closet armed with a knife, logs state. A struggle ensued, and police ultimately got their (old) man. (Raheem F. Hosseini)

“People are more prone to accidents and illnesses in the second half [of the fiscal year]. But, nevertheless, we project that we’ll end the year in a deficit position,” Shirey told council members.

Part of the problem is the city sped up collections of ambulance-service fees before the end of the last fiscal year, then forgot it did so, thus inflating the forecast for 2013-2014. “But there’s no free lunch, right?” Shirey remarked.

Through February 20, police logs show 29 people received ambulance transports this month, though that figure is likely much higher because the department only records serious incidents.

Even if ambulance rides and parking citations do see a second-half spike, the resulting revenue would be relative a drop in the municipal pail.

Overall, city finance officials identified $10.45 million worth of adjustments needing to be made, including $2.1 million to move the city’s data center out of its current floodplain location and into the city’s 911 center.

The adjustments require tapping into departmental savings and one-time revenues from the previous year.

But greater fiscal uncertainties remain. The tightest financial yolks remain unfunded health-care and pension costs of $985 million and counting. Employee health-care costs are growing at a rate of more than $79,000 a day, Shirey said.

Meanwhile, the CalPERS board recently voted to phase in pension-rate increases for local governments to address the increased life expectancies of retirees.

Finance director Milstein said the hikes could tax Sacramento an additional $2 million to $3 million in the first year of the rate increases and around $12 million the fifth and final year. “That would hurt,” she said. Ω

Measuring Measure U Remember Measure U, the half-cent sales tax that was supposed to reverse the city of Sacramento’s gloomy financial fortunes? Well, it turns out the Magic 8 Ball is still cloudy on how that’s going.

In short, the city doesn’t really know how much the temporary tax is actually raking into municipal coffers, despite first-year projections of $27 million.

Since going into effect in April 2013, Measure U has resulted in erratic collections and significant errors, finance director Leyne Milstein told the Sacramento City Council on February 11. As a result, Milstein said her department was sequestering any Measure U money it finds suspect for when the California Board of Equalization comes calling to collect.

“We already know they’ve given us more cash than we get to keep, because we know for sure that there are people who have remitted who should not have,” she added.

And you thought doing your taxes was difficult. (RFH)

Gold state for few

ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN BRENEMAN

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California is a leader … in income inequality.

So says a new report from the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank based in Washington, D.C. In “The Increasingly Unequal States of America: Income Inequality

by State, 1917 to 2011,” authors Estelle Sommeiller and Mark Price estimate that California is one of 17 states where the “top 1 percent captured more than 100 percent of the overall increase in income” from 2009 to 2011.

What drives this trend? In part, the same thing that’s occurring around the rest of the nation. “Unionization and collective bargaining levels are at historic lows not seen since before 1928,” while corporate CEOs get taxpayer bonuses “after bankrupting their companies,” the report states.

According to the authors, there’s also a correlation between California’s information-technology industry and lopsided income growth. Along with tech-friendly Massachusetts and Washington, California was home to one of the biggest income-inequality jumps in the nation between 1979 and 2007. (Seth Sandronsky)

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$2 billion general fund. Not considering how much accessibility and transparency it would buy. (Don’t forget, the county blew $21,000 just buying new furniture for county executive Brad Hudson’s office a couple years ago.)

But maybe money isn’t the only issue.

“We’re just comfortable with the paper,” explained Alice Jarboe, assistant county registrar.

Are we? In a time when corporations are considered people and campaign cash is considered speech, disclosure is one of the few tools we have to counter the influence of money in politics. Are we really comfortable putting this important information out of reach of our citizens, while the large majority of Californians live in places with much greater transparency?

How about this? Let citizens take the files the county already has in its possession and put them on an outside website for the public to access. It would be easy to do.

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But there are unnecessary obstacles to this solution, too. The county requires candidates and committees to turn in their campaign reports as a paper hard copy, rather than any sort of useful electronic document. The county then takes those paper hard copies and scans them, generating TIFF image files, which aren’t searchable and that are hard to work with if you want to do any sort of analysis.

As this column was going to print, Jarboe told Bites that the county’s legal counsel has agreed the county registrar could turn over the TIFF files to any member of the public who requests them. They’re clunky, and anyone who wants to post them online may have to redact the addresses of individual donors. Bites has been trying to get an answer from the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission on that. But they’re a little bit better than nothing.

This is basic stuff. Sacramento County can meet the same standard of transparency that most California residents enjoy, and our democracy would be healthier for it. It’s an easy problem, if we’re not too comfortable to fix it. Ω

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to Paul martin

d reka Roa 1455 Eu A C , Roseville in the

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What is a reasonable price for government transparency?

For several years now, California’s cities and counties have been putting campaignfinance information online, so that residents can find out who gives money to local politicians.

Want to know who’s funding the campaigns of your local school board or currying favor with your representative on the county Board arviN of Supervisors or bankrolling the district

by CoSmo G attorney? Most Californians can find out cosmog@ newsrev iew.c om with just a few clicks.

But not Sacramento County residents.

Here, if you want to find out about local campaign cash, you have to travel to the county registrar’s office on Florin Road.

There, you can sit at a computer terminal in the lobby and look through reports one by one. You’ll need to take a lot of notes, unless you want to pay a county employee to make photocopies for you.

Maybe not so bad for reporters who, in theory, get paid to do that sort of thing. But what if you have a real job and can’t get to south Sac by closing time? What if you’re on public transit? What if you can’t afford the photocopies?

Among the 10 most populous counties in California, Sacramento County is the only county that does not provide campaign-finance information online. And many smaller counties are way ahead of us as well. Here, citizens have no reasonably easy way to find out who is funding the campaigns of important offices like county supervisor, school board, district attorney, sheriff or SMUD board. That information is out of reach.

Contrast this with the system used by the city of Sacramento. If you want information about who’s funding one side or another in the arena fight, or your local city council contest, you can easily download campaign-finance reports from your laptop, tablet or smartphone.

The city’s system will also spit out a handy spreadsheet file for use in Microsoft Excel or similar software, so anyone can slice and dice the data, analyze and share.

Most large counties in California, along with bigger cities like Sacramento, use a system called NetFile. The city of Sacramento pays about $30,000 for its NetFile account. Not exactly cheap, but neither is paying clerks to wait on document seekers and to make photocopies for them.

“Even looking at it selfishly, it saves a lot of staff time by having it on the Web 24-seven,” explained Sacramento City Clerk Shirley Concolino.

NetFile vice-president Tom Diebert told Bites it would cost $40,000 to hook Sacramento County up. The county should look at all options, but that’s not much money in a

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The filing date for the June primary election is only weeks away.

I am not running. Not just because I would not get elected.

No, it looks like too much work. Unpleasant, hard work.

Asking for campaign donations cannot be fun. Nor do I see any joy in going door to door, meeting voters who do not want to meet me. And then there’s the math—more people lose than win.

And even if you do win, elected office does not seem that pleasurable. I have attended numerous public meetings, and believe me, I have been grateful for my freedom to leave. Yet the work is critical. l ne ae nK

by Jeff Vo I appreciate anyone who is willing to spend the time and money to run for office, whether I agree with j e ffv @n e wsr e v ie w.c o m his or her politics or not.

As a newspaper publisher, I go to many events where I meet politicians and would-be politicians. After a prospective candidate introduces themselves, it would seem rude to say, “So, do you think it will rain soon?” Or, “What about I have even had the Giants’ pitching?” Or, “Can you believe what Kim candidates tell me that Kardashian wore to the Emmy I can’t trick them into Awards?” No, these questions not appropriate. talking about the issues. are So I used to ask, “How is the campaign going?” Big mistake. The campaign is always “going well.” There are as many campaigns going well as there are cute babies. Often I know how their campaign is actually going. So, my natural follow-up question would be: “Are you lying to me, or are you just out of touch with reality?” A bit awkward.

Now I ask candidates about the important issues of the campaign. I thought this was a respectful, nonthreatening question that every candidate would jump at. Boy, was I wrong.

Visit the Many candidates cannot or will not answer this question.

Sacramento County Some look puzzled. A few say, “I just want to give back.” elections website Others: “I want to get rid of wasteful spending.” When I ask to learn about offices that are for specifics, I get a blank look. I have even had candidates up for re-election tell me that I can’t trick them into talking about the issues. on June 14, at I am not joking. http://tinyurl.com/ Then, there are candidates that jump at the chance to PositionsUp, and register to vote at talk about issues. These candidates have real opinions and http://tinyurl.com/ great insight, but they want to talk “off the record.” I am OnlineVoterReg. supposed to support them for opinions that they won’t address publicly and certainly never in their campaign materials. For, you see, their campaign materials are controlled by their highly paid political operatives who have no use for explaining political issues. Why bother when attack ads and slogans are so effective?

Jeff vonKaenel Without issues to cover, the media is left covering is the president, campaigns, donations and advertising messages. This is CEO and about as interesting as the Giants’ pitching rotation or as majority owner of the News & Review Kim Kardashian’s dress “controversy.”

So, if you are thinking of running for office and newspapers in Sacramento, don’t have any issues to run on, I would like to make a Chico and Reno. suggestion: Do not run. Ω

This Modern World

by tom tomorrow

The long game There’s no doubt that California has water problems.

The story of California has been a story of water— its presence, its lack, the movement of water from one place to another, the fights over water rights, the lakes that disappear or are created in the course of transferring water from the place in which it naturally occurs or accumulates to where we want or need it now.

In this obsession with liquid gold, California is not alone. Vast parts of the intensely beautiful American West are arid or desert; that hasn’t stopped millions of us from living and working there.

What we haven’t done, at least not in the last century of technological miracles, is pay the actual cost of water. This is as true here in Sacramento—where special legislative pleadings kept water meters at bay for years, and where current housing plans for the exurbs exceed projected housing need by more than 100 percent—as it is in the Southern California metropolises, where water is pumped and diverted from miles away to serve the needs of an ever-growing, ever-thirsty population.

Gov. Jerry Brown hopes to leave a legacy for generations with his rather oddly named Bay Delta Conservation Plan, which backers promise will stabilize the ecosystems of the Delta while still delivering much-needed water to Southern California via twin tunnels that are expected to be around 40-feet wide.

At the same time, plans for new housing in the Rancho Murieta area would turn a sleepy rural road into a major commuting artery—and even with proposed new bus service, it will certainly require major upgrades to handle increased traffic on Jackson Road.

All droughts pass, and most estimates of the long-term effects of climate change predict a future for Northern California that is, if warmer, also wetter. And, so far, we’re not in danger of running out of farmland.

But let’s talk long-term, when Northern California will need to feed even more people than it does now, and when Southern California will have an even larger, thirstier population.

What we have here is an underlying question of morality, one which we expect our ethically inclined governor to take seriously, even if we have trouble persuading local political and planning figures to do so.

First, should we be encouraging the continuation—in fact, the expansion—of an already unsustainable population in an area that hasn’t got the resources to provide enough water? And second, should we continue to turn farmland into exurban housing when urban and suburban infill hasn’t even reached its saturation point?

The issue, from a moral perspective—one that considers the needs of the entire state, the needs of the land and the needs of the living things on it (including humans)—is whether we should be living in places that are environmentally fragile and unsuited for our continued habitation, not to mention expansion. And whether our agricultural land and green space has value to future generations greater than its value to current homeowners.

For just a moment, we ask our governor, legislators, and local representatives and planners to think in geologic time when contemplating legacies. Will it be the short-term advantage of unchecked growth at the expense of the natural world? Or will it be telling the hard truth about the West, water and land: There isn’t enough to do everything.

In a thousand years, none of us will be here, but if we make morally sound decisions, the Delta and the surrounding rural valley just might. Ω

Why not pair your most pretentious tastes?

Imagine a pan-seared scallop, with yuzu gel and fried you hear when you chomp down on celery is cellophane noodles, and some lemongrass satisfying, and similarly, music can enhance by ponzu and chili oil. Got it? OK, now taste it tastes. It might be more obvious if you think Janelle Bitker (most likely in your head) while listening to about awful pairings, like a homey roast chicken “Everything in its Right Place” by Radiohead. with Aphex Twin, or a delicate filet of sole with I’ve been playing this game for a while. To The Notorious B.I.G. be honest, I’m not sure it’s an ideal pairing.

When I lived in the Bay Area, my heart An olive-oil poached salmon, perhaps? Or swelled whenever a guest chef served fancy grilled spot prawns served simply with lime? plates at rock concerts. The Outside Lands music “Everything in its Right Place” is definitely, at festival exemplifies that cross-pollination of least, a seafood dish. Of joy. Indeed, that’s when I that, I am certain. discovered www.turntable Last week, a chef in Given Sacramento’s kitchen.com, a blog of recipes Detroit held a Radioheadwith musical pairings. obsession with themed pop-up Given Sacramento’s dinner—10 courses paired pop-ups, music-food obsession with pop-ups, I think with the 10 songs from music-food dinners are the next dinners are the Kid A. I recited the first innovation. Or you could play next reasonable dish. They only get more this game at home. Here’s my decadent. Lamb chops imaginary home-cook menu, innovation. with crispy pig ear and paired with artists who recently blood-orange reduction had gigs in Sacramento: An online version of this 1. Chopped kale salad with pecorino and essay can be found at for “The National Anthem,” an arugula salad walnuts, paired with “The Feeling of Feeling” by www.newsreview.com/ with sous vide egg and various molecular gastrosacramento/ nomic components for “Idioteque,” and chocoMusical Charis. pageburner/blogs. late mousse with blackberry pâte de fruit for the 2. Curried carrot soup with ginger and cococlosing track, “Motion Picture Soundtrack.” nut, paired with “Natural Feelings” by Pregnant.

As a hardcore food and music lover—I’ve 3. Risotto with leeks and wild mushrooms, probably had only slightly more fantasies about paired with “When I’m Small” by Phantogram. scallops than Thom Yorke—I fully support any 4. Silky chocolate torte with a dash of sea merging of those two worlds. Think about it: salt, paired with “Pieces” by the Seshen.

Eating is an all-senses experience. That crunch Wine and beer pairings optional. Ω BEFORE

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To understand water in California, past and present, as well as some future scenarios, we suggest The West Without Water: What Past Floods, droughts, and other Climatic Clues Tell Us About Tomorrow ($29.95, University of California Press) by B. lynn ingram and Frances Malamud-roam.

For more on the proposed delta tunnels, read “Water fight!: Will Jerry Brown’s tunnel plan save or destroy the delta?” by Alaistair Bland (sn&r Feature story, June 27, 2013).

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Crafting the

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beer bang

How the Sacramento brew scene exploded— and will it last?

by nick miller

nickam@ newsreview.com

photos by steven chea

The Beer R Week dozen

ick Sellers says people ask him all the time: “How many breweries are there in Sacramento these days?”

It’s a fair question, because five years ago, there were fewer than 10, but now it’s apparent to even a Coors Light guzzler that the craftbeer businesses is multiplying. What a buzzkill to keep track.

Enter Sellers: He pours at the popular Samuel Horne’s Tavern in Folsom and has worked as beer director for Draft Magazine, plus co-founded Sacramento Beer Week, opened a brewery once, and writes about suds at the website Pacific Brew News. He recently went online to tally up all the new breweries— and that’s when he says things got “stupid.”

In less than five years, local breweries have grown by nearly 400 percent. There are at least 37 within a 50-mile radius of downtown—with more than five poised to open in the coming months. For comparison, Sacramento County boasts fewer than 15 wineries. Comparing wine and beer is not apples to apples, sure, but there’s no denying the speed by which beer is overtaking local palates.

“And I don’t think we’re going to take our foot off the gas,” Sellers told SN&R. But this big beer bang brings a bevy of questions. Who are these new brewers, and why’d they quit their jobs to roll the dice on beer? Plus, who’s drinking all of it? Is this just a craft-beer bubble? And—perhaps most importantly—is this local beer any good?

The fifth annual Sacramento Beer Week kicks off today, but the research began weeks ago: chatting with local brewers, sampling their suds, enduring workday-morning hangovers. Surprisingly, there’s not a lot of agreement about where this brew craze is headed.

Most agree it’s a good thing. But with caveats.

“I don’t think there are too many breweries,” was how Annie Johnson, local homebrewer going on 18 years—and last year’s American Homebrewers Association’s national homebrewer of the year winner— put it.

“But they’re not all created equally.”

Brew the righ

Mike Mraz was known in El Dorado Hills as “the homebrewer guy.” Now he works full time and more at his own brewery, Mraz Brewing Company.

“the Beer issue” continued on page 18

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Ken Anthony says he brews nonstop to keep up with demand at his 14th Avenue taproom, Device Brewing Co., which opened in November 2013.

Beer’s co meB ack

But many beer enthusiasts point to which is open Wednesday through February 11, 2012, when Knee Deep Sunday. The guys haven’t even turned won the gold medal at the esteemed a year old, and they’re already orderBistro’s Double IPA Festival during ing more tanks to expand.

San Francisco Beer Week. The local It’s a similar story closer to downbrewery’s Hoptologist beat out Pliny town at Device Brewing Co., where the Elder—the brew out of Russian brewer Ken Anthony is so busy that River Brewing Company in Santa he can hardly brew enough to keep the Rosa with the cultlike following—for taproom stocked (although, he proudly that year’s top prize. This not only put explained, “We have not run out of Knee Deep on the national map, but in beer once”). many ways it also prompted locals to stop dreaming and start brewing.

Mike Mraz in El Dorado Annie Johnson Hills is one Sacramento homebrewer going on 18 years of those new brewers. He says he’d always been a “beer geek,” Anthony started selling beer in but thought making your own beer kegs late last summer and officially was some kind of “black magic.” opened his brewery taproom in That is, until he started doing so out November, located in an industrial of his backyard in 2006, brewing area on 14th Avenue off of Power Belgian styles, then winning awards Inn Road in south Sacramento. The and becoming known as the “local UC San Diego graduate, who got homebrew guy.” into homebrewing down south while Buddies with the popular Santa embracing that city’s renowned craftCruz brewer Tim Clifford, of Sante beer scene, had been talking about Adairius Rustic Ales (with whom he opening a brewery for six years. When still goes surfing occasionally), Mraz he moved back here in 2011—and made operating a brewery his fulldrank some of that famous Knee Deep time gig in May of last year. brew and “got inspired”—he pulled At Mraz Brewing Company, the the trigger. self-described “control freak” brews Now, he can’t stop. Literally. delicate, smart, risk-taking brews “The rate at which we gained traction while his son Justin runs the taproom, here was surprising,” he says. “I’m brewing it at a frantic pace.” And he’s

Less than a handful of years ago, the local beer community wasn’t marveling in its riches. It was bracing for a death rattle.

“It was miserable,” Sellers said of the years during the recession between 2007 and 2010, a period when many local breweries— Sacramento Brewing Company (both locations), Elk Grove Brewery Restaurant, Beermann’s, Brew It Up! and his own Odanata Beer Company—all shuttered. “We didn’t know who was going to make it.”

Sacramento was an anomaly, turns out. Across the country, the craft-brew industry continued with steady growth during those years, upholding the presumption that the alcohol biz is largely recession-proof. The number of craft-beer barrels produced nationwide, for instance, jumped more than 25 percent between 2007 and 2010, and 300 new craft breweries opened as well, according to the U.S. Brewers Association.

Then, just when Sacto’s beer scene was about to “drain pour”—a beer-nerd term for pouring a bad bottle of brew down the sink—along came the bang.

Breweries such as Knee Deep Brewing Co., first located in Lincoln and now in Auburn, opened in 2010.

Track 7 Brewing Co., which operates just south of Sacramento City College, started brewing a year later.

Ditto others.

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already planning to expand by increasing some of his fermentation capacity.

Beer is perhaps growing at a more rapid pace than when the first breweries popped up in the late 19th century. The numbers don’t lie: In 2012, Golden State craft brewers amounted to $4.7 billion in economic impact, according the California Craft Brewers Association. The industry also grew by 20 percent that year, with the total number of barrels brewed increasing by a whopping 400,000.

Sellers, who’s been in the beer game for decades, views the explosion in a positive light. “I’m just happy to see the focus on beer again.”

But can there be too much beer?

“i don’t tHink tHere are too many Breweries.

But tHey’re not all created equally.”

Here come s tHe n eigHBor H ood ( Br e we r y ) Nanobrewery is an inside-baseball term for what’s essentially a smaller community brewery. Local nanobreweries like Device or Mraz produce limited quantities of brew, but enough to serve a niche. Beer lovers like Sellers say that these new community breweries are going to change how Sacramentans buy beer.

Hello, local brew; goodbye, Coors Light?

“I think it’s going to be a paradigm shift,” he explained. “I don’t think there’s going to be a bubble,” he said of the peak-beer hypothesis.

He sees things working out like this: After work on Friday, the average beer mom or dad will cease buying six-packs at the Raley’s or Safeway. Instead, they’ll cruise by places like Track 7 in Curtis Park or Bike Dog Brewing Company in West Sacramento. They’ll have a quick pint, grab a 64-ounce growler to go, and then cruise home and rejoin the family for dinner.

“I think that that’s definitely where we are going,” Device’s Anthony agreed. “I think as more breweries are opening, they’re going to become neighborhood breweries.”

It’s worth noting that there are many Sacramento neighborhoods, including but not limited to Antelope and Carmichael, that don’t have community breweries yet.

If this scenario plays out, it’ll be very much a David vs. Goliath economy. Mraz in El Dorado Hills brews only 250 barrels a year.

Device predicts it will crest 300.

You likely won’t see their beers outside of California, at least for now. By comparison, behemoth Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. produces nearly 1 million out of nearby Chico.

Homebrewer Johnson says she loves all the new breweries, but that the bubble’s going to burst, because it gets so saturated.

“But it’s hard to say,” she hedged.

A lot depends on a brewery’s ambition. Do they want to pour for just dads down the street, or do they want to compete on the shelves of Total Wine & More, which already are packed rows deep with locals such as Ruhstaller Beer, Out of Bounds Brewing Company, American River Brewing Company and Track 7?

Or do they, like Knee Deep, want to distribute their beer all the way across the country in New York City?

“There’s not too many breweries,” Sellers argued. “But I think there’s obviously a finite amount of shelf space.”

Perhaps restaurants and bars can help? There’s already a proverbial “draft war” going on—where local businesses engage in rounds of one-upmanship by placing as many beers as they can on tap to outdo the competition. Blackbird Kitchen & Beer Gallery, the newly reopened spot on Ninth Street, boasts some 50 taps. University of Beer, the Davis spot opening a new location soon in Midtown on 16th Street, promises nearly 90. This could be a boon for local breweries. Or it could result in a ton of stale beer. Which brings us to perhaps the most crucial issue of all: Is Sacramento beer any good?

For years, River City beer was limited to a few strongholds, such as Rubicon Brewing Company in Midtown, which a quarter-century ago was winning IPA awards at the nation’s biggest beer festivals and practically inventing styles such as wheat wine. Now, with breweries like the admired Berryessa Brewing Co. in nearby Winters, it’s difficult for staples like Rubicon to stand out.

The good news is, as Johnson said, the modern beer drinker “will drink anything.”

“And I like that anybody’s willing to try things. I think drinkers have evolved,” she added.

That said, she does think that local brewers, many of whom have been open for less than a couple years, still need to “do their homework.”

So far, the new guard of Sacramento breweries is a mixed bag (see page 21 for a chart detailing results from this paper’s debut Beer Issue competition). Meanwhile, members of local homebrew organizations—such as the Gold Country Brewers Association and the Greenbelt Brewers Association—wait in the wings as the next guard of brewery owners. Not to mention Boneshaker Public House in Rocklin, Yolo Brewing Company in West Sac, Oak Park Brewing Company, Big Sexy Brewing Company in Auburn, and Lockdown Brewing Co. in Rancho Cordova, who all plan to open practically any day now. It’s a lot to keep tabs on.

“How many breweries are there in Sacramento these days?” you ask.

Just pour me a damn beer. Ω

Bike Dog Brewing Company co-owner A.J. Tendick says his West Sacramento brewery plans to remain small—even though it’s already doubled its brewing capacity since opening in October 2013.

Farm

by Becky Grunewald

I

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NEWS

beer bang

t’s become a formula: beer plus bikes, plus food trucks, plus kids, plus dogs equals brewery.

Bike Dog Brewery Company is on trend with all of these things, right down to its name.

It has the typical chalkboard menu, brewers in rubber boots, long benches and picnic tables, and ’90s rock coming from the speakers. The way it distinguishes itself is with its beer (as evinced by its second-place finish in this paper’s Beer Issue competition; see page 21), despite the business only being open for five months.

began. They moved from the idea of a craft-beer bar to a brewery, because the cost would be lower, although Tendick ruefully laughed that this may not have turned out to be the case.

The four searched for an industrial area and found that the special-use permit required in Sacramento was prohibitively expensive, so they turned their sights to West Sacramento.

Tendick said it was a natural fit because he lives there. And because he says he loves West Sac. “We know the mayor. For our first shot at this, we needed a little help to not get lost in the bureaucracy.”

During their grand opening in October 2013, they had around 1,000 customers. Tendick said they were “elbow to elbow all day long” from the moment they opened at 9 o’clock.

“There was never not a 20-foot line. We ran out of glasses and had to run out and get plastic cups,” he said. “Total mayhem.”

Since its opening, business has been steady to the point where Tendick even has been crossing his fingers for a couple slow weekends, so that they don’t run out of beer halfway through Beer Week. This is still a possibility: The few rainy weekend days we’ve had, and even Valentine’s Day, did not dampen sales.

This week, a Beer Week Pale—using Galaxy, Nelson and Pacific Jade hops to put a Southern Hemisphere spin on things—will be tapped.

It’s part of a Beer Week pale-ale competition with other local breweries at the opening gala.

The Dog will also be doing a tap takeover on

The Beer Week dozen

“We ran out of glasses and had to run out and get plastic cups. total mayhem.”

A.J. Tendick co-owner, Bike Dog Brewing Company, on their opening day

Bike Dog started as a pipe dream between four friends, Raef Porter (chief hop counter), Pete Atwood (head brewer), A.J. Tendick (assistant brewer) and Sage Smith (arbiter of taste). At some point, the talk turned serious, and the planning

Sacramento Beer Week kicks off Thursday, February 27, and continues through Sunday, March 9. Find out more at www.sacramentobeerweek.com.

BEFORE

Crafting the

West Sacramento brewery succeeds out of the gate with community-taproom model

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Wednesday, March 5, at Magpie Cafe, which Tendick jokes is “perfect, because they only have four taps, and we don’t have that much beer.”

In addition to the Beer Week Pale and a few upcoming seasonals, Bike Dog’s regular beer offerings are a saison, a different pale ale, a milk stout, an American wheat, a wee heavy, and three IPAs: a session, a regular and a double. The session IPA is perhaps the best—it’s surprisingly hoppy for a beer with 5.5 percent alcohol by volume, super aromatic, light-bodied and refreshing. It hits the bull’s-eye for a day-drinking, post-bike-ride beer.

Although the plan is to remain small, Bike Dog has already doubled its brewing capacity, and before the year is out, it will probably add another two tanks to triple its beer output. It is also looking into opening Thursday through Sunday, rather than its current Friday through Saturday schedule, but at the current rate of sales, the extra open hours would lead to the brewery running out of hops halfway through the year.

Tendick is currently “scrambling” to get his hands on more.

With its balance of practicality, skill and creativity, Bike Dog seems to be doing everything right, from the name up. Ω

Visit Bike Dog Brewing Company at 2534 Industrial Boulevard, Suite 110 in West Sacramento; (916) 432-3376; www.bikedogbrewing.com.

Brew the right thi

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Brew t

BEeR cont inue d fro m pa ge 19

SN&R’s first ever Beer Issue IPA competition ranks the region’s best (and worst) hopped beers

Catherine Johnson (center) founded Goathouse Brewing Co. with husband Michael.

The Lincoln-based company specializes in brews using fresh ingredients from the Johnson’s own agricultural bounty.

Farm to pint

by Daniel Barnes

I

A husband-wife duo gets goose bumps, starts countryside farmhouse brewery

t doesn’t take long after turning off a narrow country road in Lincoln to realize that Goathouse Brewing Co. is a special place. Beyond the parking spaces drawn on a patch of manicured gravel, there is a lovingly kept garden to the left, hop vines growing to the right, a cluster of beehives in the distance, and straight ahead a small pond populated by cantankerous geese named Oompa and Loompa.

Most importantly, there is a beautiful red barn where Goathouse brews and serves its beer, most of which incorporate hops, orchard fruits, honey and other ingredients grown on the property. A farmhouse brewery located in a part of Lincoln untouched by chain stores and condos, Goathouse is unlike any other area brewing operation.

It’s a testament to the variety of the Sacramento beer scene, and also a tantalizing vision of what it could become.

Owners Michael and Catherine Johnson were just as charmed by the Lincoln property when they first spotted it two years ago. “It was love at first sight,” says Catherine, an ex-marketing exec who tends the farm while husband Michael handles the beer. “We got goose bumps.” Although they have been open for five months, Goathouse Brewing is a project more than seven years in the making, originating as the exhausted dream of overworked Alameda parents.

The couple’s prebrewery life consisted of long commutes, impossible hours, and the often futile hope of connecting with their kids and each other on the weekends. Catherine says, “We asked ourselves, ‘Can we switch up that model?’ If we’re going to work those kinds of hours, let’s do something that we love.”

After years of living in Alameda, they knew they wanted land. Michael had been brewing beer since he was legally able to drink it, and Catherine was a longtime gardening enthusiast. They were already growing some of their own food, and the connection between growing hops, brewing beer and getting back to the land led to the idea of starting a nanobrewery.

20 | SN&R | 02.27.14

It took five years to settle on a location for their dream project, as they combed through overpriced plots in Napa and Sonoma and nearly closed on a more traditionally industrial brewing space in Alameda. After discovering the farm in Lincoln, they snapped it up, and then spent two years renovating the space and working with Placer County on licenses.

The process was drawn out in part by the uniqueness of the Goathouse concept, which combines brewing and agriculture (as well as a home for the Johnsons and their two children) in a fashion more common to the Belgian countryside than the Sacramento Valley. “There had really been nothing else like it before,” says Catherine, “so it’s a little confusing for some people.”

Currently, Goathouse brews on a three-barrel system, and they have no plans to bottle or distribute. “We wanted to change up the typical volume business of a brewery,” says Catherine. “We’re not trying to take over the world right away.” Even though she comes from advertising, they’ve done zero marketing so far. “It’s all been word of mouth. Our model is the experience, not just the beer.”

That’s not to say the beer isn’t fantastic.

Michael’s brews display the same care and investment evident in the beauty of the farm and the quaint charm of the tasting room.

Ménage is a refreshing Belgian tripel brewed with citrus grown in the Goathouse orchard, and the creamy Honeyweizen features honey from their own hives.

Best of all is the Jagged Little Pils, a peppery pilsner brewed with kölsch yeast, which gives the beer a blue-cheeselike bite.

Even better, there are no blaring widescreen TVs in the tasting room, only a vintage jukebox and a couple of picnic tables with a history of their own. Michael crafted the tables out of repurposed wood from the renovated barn’s old horse stalls, and that wood turned out to have been salvaged bench seats from Kezar Stadium, where the San Francisco 49ers used to play home games.

It’s an almost ridiculously apt metaphor for the Goathouse Brewing pilgrimage, which began in the bustle of the Bay Area but found an identity in the Lincoln countryside. Ω

It’s a testament to the varIety of the sacramento beer scene and also a tantalIzIng vIsIon of what It could become.

L

ocal beer’s popularity might be the highest it’s been since hops first emerged in Sacramento from soil near Broadway around 1857. But with more than three dozen regional breweries operating today, and many of them new, navigating Sacto’s brew offerings can be a pioneer’s task.

That’s one of the reasons why SN&R assembled a panel of notable local palates to taste and judge brews for this year’s Beer Issue. Just like how food writers review restaurants, it’s come time to celebrate our best suds—and forewarn the duds.

It was with the utmost consideration that we selected 16 Sacto-area breweries to participate in this paper’s inaugural Beer Issue competition. IPA was chosen as the main style, mostly because it’s a common denominator: Nearly all local breweries pour one. Also, it’s a good starting point to appraise a brewer’s skill.

We took good care to acquire the freshest IPAs and hopped beers. If this meant hunting a growler down from, say, Mraz Brewing Company in El Dorado Hills, so be it. That said, many beer drinkers encounter brew at retail stores, so bottles—such as those by American River Brewing Company and Knee Deep Brewing Co. on the shelves at Corti Bros.—were fair game as well.

The judges— His & Her Beer Notes blog’s husbandwife duo (SN&R film critic) Daniel Barnes and Darcey Self, Sacramento Bee food writer Chris Macias, Midtown Cocktail Week organizer Whitney Johnson, Sacramento Foodways editor Becky Grunewald, homebrewer and former beer judge Steve Allcock—sampled all beers blindly. They didn’t know what the hell we were giving them, except whether the brew varied from traditional IPA style, or minor details, such as its alcohol by volume. Conversation was encouraged, but each judge was responsible for their own tasting notes and a final grade.

The consensus: As one judge wrote, “lots of beer is being brewed in Sac but only a fraction of it is worth the hype.”

There were, of course, standouts—Berryessa Brewing Co. in Winters took the big prize—but it’s also worth noting that the B- and C-grade beers largely proffered drinkability.

The Sacto beer scene in a handful of years is an exciting prospect.

Sadly, there were some really bad brews. River City Brewing Company’s IPA, what with its incongruous smokiness and medicinal aftertaste, should not be seeing the light of pints. Ditto the Hop Sac by Ruhstaller Beer, a company that otherwise brews potable suds. This wet-hop ale, which is supposed to celebrate this region’s hop terroir, needs to be pulled from shelves.

The good outweighed the ugly. New kids on the West Sac block Bike Dog Brewing Company impress with their hop-brewing proficiency. Ditto brewer Ryan Graham at Track 7 Brewing Co. Plus, there are all the newer nanobreweries like Device Brewing Company in south Sacramento and Out of Bounds Brewing Company in Rocklin.

In the end, the tasting was celebratory. It’s beer, it’s fun! And it can get better. Drinking this many brews head to head is informative. It makes us better consumers.

We hope brewers appreciate the feedback. We certainly welcome the brew.

photoS by Sue Southwick

w the right thing BEER

THE GOOD

THE BAD

OTHER NOTES

SSB IPA by American River Brewing Company

Nice citrus nose, lovely golden color, clean finish

One note, not challenging, a bit too restrained

Attractive

PU 240 Imperial IPA by Auburn Alehouse Brewery

Nice citrus and caramel notes, balanced

Falls off quickly, thin body

Surprisingly not a powerful hop bomb

The House IPA by Berryessa Brewing Co.

Profoundly hoppy, grapefruitzest nose, nice lacing, smooth and balanced

Slightly hot finish

“Makes happy face!”

IPA by Bike Dog Brewing Company

Fresh, bright and hoppy, strong grassy and butterscotch nose

A touch flat, a little metallic, a bit too sweet

“A Labrador puppy of a beer.”

“Can we have more?”

Integral IPA by Device Brewing Co.

Nice stone-fruit aroma, juicy body

Lingering bitterness, too yeasty

Simple but drinkable

Hoppy Face Amber Ale by Hoppy Brewing Company

Nice toffee notes, malty nose, mild, sessionable

Too mild, a bit metallic

Not really an IPA

Batch 138 IPA by Knee Deep Brewing Co.

Dank hop aroma, nice caramel notes

Too musty, promising nose but dead body

Unique malt backbone, needs more hops

EDH IPA by Mraz Brewing Company

Beautiful peach, tropical nose; balanced, peppery

Lacks the hop punch of the top-three beers

“Solid.”

Mightly Eighth IPA by New Glory Craft Brewery

Desserty aroma, flowery nose, smooth

A little thin, overly floral

“The Billy Dee Williams of IPAs.”

Thunderbeast IPA by New Helvetia Brewing Company

Cheesy nose, big mouth explosion

Vegetal, odd spice notes, lacks malt backbone

“The Pop Rocks of IPAs.”

Two Headed Rooster Double IPA by Out of Bounds Brewing Company

Bubblegum nose; juicy, light but hoppy

Diesel-fuel taste, aroma a bit too fruit cup, thin finish

“I’m confused, but in a good way.”

Cap City IPA by River City Brewing

Nothing

Smells like something went wrong, contaminated?

“You’re trying to kill us.”

Spike Driver Double IPA by Roseville Brewing Company

Sweet nose, grassy

One note, very little hop taste, funky, compost-pile finish

“Tastes like how the floors at Streets of London smell.”

IPA by Rubicon Brewing Company

Nice tea-leaf notes, good nose

Bland, drinkable but boring, unbalanced

“Where are the hops?”

Hop Sac by Ruhstaller Beer

Nothing

Smells like a teenager, rotten carrots

“I actually gagged.”

Not quite a showstopper

Very drinkable, pleasant

Panic IPA by Track 7 Brewing Co.

Great nose; balanced; nice dry, pine-needle finish; light body

GRADE

BB A+ A B-

Incomplete (Hoppy needs to brew a house IPA!)

B+ B+ C+ cBf d D+ F a-

“the Beer issue” continued on page 25

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The Beer Week dozen

BEe

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Threeway

m fro ued n i t con

e 21 pag

A few don’tmiss beers during Sacramento Beer Week

by janelle bitker

You can’t attend every event this year (or can you?). Anyway, here are 12.

Brew the

You’re not getting any younger. And you’re not getting any Younger. As in the stupidly hyped Russian River Brewing Company triple IPA of the Pliny genus, which will converge on Sacramento—multihour lines and all—during this incarnation of Sacramento Beer Week.

Screw that. So many other beers worth not queuing for. Here are a few:

geT fu nky

Track 7 Brewing Co.’s Ryan Graham rolls out the barrels, just in time for the brewery’s Sacramento Beer Week events.

S

1. Device Brewing Co. and Track 7 Brewing Co. are collaborating for Beer Week to make the Friendly Fire English Barleywine. This will be an intense, sweet brew with booming alcohol—Ken Anthony at Device says it’s gonna land at 12 percent.

“It’s big, badass,” he claims.

Find it at Device or Track 7.

acramento’s 11-day-long celebration of its precious, effervescent nectar of course results in more than 400 events around town. Yikes—talk about overwhelming. There are obvious highlights: the Sacramento Brewers Showcase on opening night, featuring 27 local breweries; and the grand finale, Capitol Beer Fest, brings more than 100 breweries to the Capitol Mall. But what else? Such decisions can be a serious buzzkill, so allow us to make life easier. In chronological order, here are a dozen picks to ensure a well-earned hangover.

2. Berryessa Brewing Co.’s Chris Miller has his own third-level IPA, Trendy Triple IPA, a sly nod to the Younger and its ubiquitous hype.

This brew might actually be better: dry and piney with lovely grapefruit and tropical aromas. Find this around town and at his brewery in Winters.

Pucker uP Start off the week right at LowBrau’s Dark & Sour night for a most impressive lineup. The dark side includes Deschutes Brewery’s Black Butte XXV, a 25th-anniversary reserve brew, and Væsal Brunch, a blend of two imperial stouts from Amager Bryghus and Mikkeller. On the sour side, look forward to Almanac Beer Company’s Sourdough Wild Ale and Bourbon Sour Porter.

5 p.m. on Thursday, February 27; 1050 20th Street, (916) 706-2636, www.lowbrausacramento.com.

3. Drink your milk stout at Bike Dog Brewing Company—and why not give its eight variants a spin, too. Brew nerds hoping to try Goose Island’s Proprietor’s or Cigar City Brewing’s Life Is Like will get some satisfaction from Bike Dog’s coconut or bourbon versions.

BEFORE

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NEWS

janelleb@ newsreview.com

TriPle release Unusual brews can be had all week long at Track 7 Brewing Co., but head to the taproom this Friday for three special releases: Friendly Fire,

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F E AT U R E

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an English barleywine brewed in collaboration with Device Brewing Co.; a Beer Week IPA; and a white stout. 3 p.m. on Friday, February 28; 3747 W. Pacific Avenue, Suite F; (916) 520-4677; www.track7 brewing.com.

lo ca l s o n ly A number of bars are dedicating a night to Sacramento’s own talent, but Local Brewers Night at Final Gravity rises to the top. The brewers behind Auburn Alehouse, Track 7, American River Brewing Company, Berryessa Brewing Co., Loomis Basin Brewing Company, Knee Deep Brewing Co., Out of Bounds Brewing Company, Device Brewing and Mraz Brewing Company will all be present, touting three beers apiece. 5 p.m. on Saturday, March 1; 9205 Sierra College Boulevard, Suite 100 in Roseville; (916) 782-1166; www.final gravitybeer.com.

u d d erly d el ig hTfu l How does a chili-milk stout sound?

Or a cocoa-nib, orange-peel stout?

Or perhaps one with bourbon is more your speed? Try ’em all, side by side at Bike Dog Brewing Company, as the brewers take its milk stout and flavor it eight different ways.

2 p.m. on Saturday, March 1; 2534 Industrial Boulevard, Suite 110 in West Sacramento; (916) 432-3376; www.bikedog brewing.com. | A R T S & C U L T U R E

Head over to Samuel Horne’s Tavern for the super popular—and fifth annual— Funk & Sour Festival. The bar’s 16 taps will give way to wild-yeast beers, and folks can work through them all— one flight of four tasters at a time.

11 a.m. on Saturday, March 1; 719 Sutter Street in Folsom, (916) 293-8207, www.samhornes.com.

sha ckTac ul ar , br o Shack Fest at The Shack is renowned for good reason: unlimited pours from 14 (mostly) local breweries, food and live music, all for a mere $30. The chaos takes place on the back patio. I can feel my beer belly already. 5 p.m. on Sunday, March 2; 5201 Folsom Boulevard; (916) 457-5997; www.eastsacshack.com.

Pig o u T The only thing Sacramentans might love as much as beer is pork. Head to Ten22 for an oh-so succulent pig roast. A $25 ticket gets you unlimited access to the “pig bar” and two beers from the Bay Area’s High Water Brewing or Bison Brewing Company. 4 p.m. on Tuesday, March 4; 1022 Second Street, (916) 852-2770, www.ten22oldsac.com.

su rf a nd Tur f Last year, Kru Contemporary Japanese Cuisine’s Billy Ngo invaded Pangaea Two Brews Cafe for a little sushi-beer action. This time around, Ngo joins Pangaea chef Robb Venditti for an evening of sushi and steak, appropriately paired with Hitachino Nest beers. 6 p.m. on Tuesday, March 4; 2743 Franklin Boulevard, (916) 454-4942, www.pangaeatwobrews.com.

notably rare, highly rated and highly alcoholic brews. Among them: Goose Island’s Bourbon County Brand Stout, Firestone Walker Brewing Company’s Sucaba, and Hangar 24 Craft Brewery’s Pugachev’s Cobra. 7 p.m. on Friday, March 7; 2222 Fair Oaks Boulevard, (916) 922-1745, www.capitolbeer.com.

ThaT’s Two ks and Two ls This could be the very first Mikkeller tap takeover in Sacramento. Hot City Pizza will tap six to eight of the Danish phantom brewery’s beautiful, bizarre kegs, which will surely go fast. And combined with homebrewing tips from Gold Country Brewers Association representatives, the event promises to be a very geeky all-day affair.

10 a.m. on Saturday, March 8; 5642 J Street, (916) 731-8888, www.hotcity-pizza.com.

shoTs, shoT s, shoTs If you’re totally sick of beer by the second Saturday, consider ordering some whiskey at Tank House BBQ and Bar. Paired with beer. More specifically, Out of Bounds Brewing pints with shots of High West Whiskey, with a special dish courtesy of the barbecue masters to boot. 3 p.m. on Saturday, March 8; 1925 J Street, (916) 431-7199, www.tankhouse bbq.com.

a boozy far e we ll Close out Beer Week strong—like, barleywine strong—at Boneshaker Public House. So far, 15 kegs of potentially 13-percent alcohol brews have been secured for the barleywine fest.

Please find a designated driver for this one, kids. 10 a.m. on Sunday, March 9; 2168 Sunset Boulevard, Suite 104 in Rocklin; (916) 259-2337; www.boneshakerpub.com.

ho PPin ’ ParTy To celebrate Hops to Table magazine’s birthday, Capitol Beer and Tap Room is throwing a party with some |

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Multi-course family-style dinner featuring Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. (including two special-release limited edition beers)

$50 per person

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EXCLUSIVE SIERRA NEVADA DINNER

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Two Rivers Cider sampling with the brewer Complimentary charcuterie from The Cultured & The Cured

03.09.14

DAYLIGHT SAVINGS PIZZA & BEER SPECIAL $22 for 22oz Track 7 Daylight Amber and choice of pizza HOCK FARM CRAFT & PROVISIONS - 4U Ä• Ä• IPDLGBSN DPN

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BURGER, FRIES & BEER

Brew are you?

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Lincoln

Auburn

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Rocklin

RoseviLle

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Davis

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Winters

3 BerryessA Brewing co.

27260 California 128 in Winters

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8251 Alpine Avenue

4480 Yankee Hill Road, Suite 100 in Rocklin

12 river city Brewing compAny

545 Downtown Plaza

13 roseville Brewing compAny

501 Derek Place in Roseville

10 new helvetiA Brewing compAny

2004 Capitol Avenue

1730 Broadway

15 trAck 7 Brewing co.

3747 W. Pacific Avenue

Ruhstaller Beer has no tasting room.

Find out more about the company at http://ruhstallerbeer.com.

Capitol Beer and Tap Room: This bottle shop is one of the top-three go-to spots in the city for brew. But don’t forget to walk to the other side of the store, with more than a dozen brews on draft. It represents locals well. 2222 Fair Oaks Boulevard, (916) 922-1745, www.capitolbeer.com.

Corti Brothers: For years, we used to lament Corti’s overlooking and neglecting of the brew. No longer: A robust selection now overflows on the eastern-most aisle of the famed grocery. 5810 Folsom Boulevard, (916) 736-3814, www.cortibros.biz.

Curtis Park Market: If you shop at this secret spot just off the grid, the guy behind the counter will eventually recognize you and start offering up the good stuff, like Deschutes Brewery’s The Abyss or Russian River Brewing Company’s Pliny the Elder. Either way, killer selection and prices at this corner market. 2703 24th Street, (916) 456-6488, www.facebook.com/curtisparkmarket.

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11 out of BounDs Brewing compAny

14 ruBicon Brewing compAny

8166 14th Avenue

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F E AT U R E

2222 Francisco Drive, Suite 510 in El Dorado Hills

9 new glory crAft Brewery

4 Bike Dog Brewing compAny

Boneshaker Public House: Basically, this is the best thing about Rocklin—and it represents local breweries such as Mraz Brewing Co. and Track 7 Brewing Co., too.

2168 Sunset Boulevard, Suite 104 in Rocklin; (916) 259-2337; www.boneshakerpub.com.

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8 mrAz Brewing compAny

5 Device Brewing co.

Brew are here

7 knee Deep Brewing co.

13395 New Airport Road, Suite H in Auburn

289 Washington Street in Auburn

L

6300 Folsom Boulevard

11151 Trade Center Drive in Rancho Cordova

et’s keep it simple: This is a list of the best local restaurants, bars and bottle shops for craft beer. Yes, this is our opinion. But, man, it’s a damn good one.

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6 hoppy Brewing compAny

2534 Industrial Boulevard in West Sacramento

Sacramento

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8

50

1 AmericAn river Brewing compAny

2 AuBurn Alehouse

Folsom El Dorado HiLls

80

5

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Where to find the regional breweries featured in SN&R’s beer-tasting competition

The Davis Beer Shoppe: This shop in Davis

LowBrau: It’s impressive how this hot

pours the most affordable drafts in the region. And its bottle-shop selection is unequaled. It’s almost motivation enough to quit journalism and apply for UC Davis law school. Except, you know, school.

Watch for the owner’s Twitter updates @FlyingBeerMan. 211 G Street in Davis, (530) 756-5212, www.facebook.com/ thedavisbeershoppe.

spot’s climbed the ranks as a local beer destination in its first year. There’s always a couple intersting rotating drafts, plus exciting #beernerdmenu bottles, too.

1050 20th Street, (916) 706-2636, www.lowbrausacramento.com.

De Vere’s Irish Pub: The introverted beer enthusiast might be turned off by de Vere’s Friday- and Saturday-night crowds. Pro tip: Sneak in during a weekday, and sniff out the good stuff. 1521 L Street, (916) 231-9947; 217 E Street in Davis, (530) 204-5533; www.deverespub.com.

Final Gravity Taproom & Bottle Shop: Some of us at SN&R grew up less than a mile away from this brew bar and bottle shop.

Of course, back then, it wasn’t even there; just an undeveloped field. If only, if only. Nowadays, the husband-and-wife owners do the beer community right—and stock some top-shelf bottles in the shop. Follow their updates on Twitter: @FinalGravityCA. 9205 Sierra College Boulevard, Suite 100 in Roseville; (916) 782-1166; www.finalgravitybeer.com.

Hot City Pizza: “Hole in the wall” best describes this joint. But oh, man, what a hole. Blessed is the East Sacramentan who can snag up a few bottles to go with regularity at Hot City. This is the only place in town we’ve seen Cantillon by the bottle to go in recent years. 5642 J Street, (916) 731-8888, www.hotcity-pizza.com.

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Pangaea Two Brews Cafe: These days, Pangaea’s been going back to its roots.

The drafts focus heavily on classic Belgian brews, plus some good sours, and the bottle shop is packed with competitively priced local beers and more. 2743 Franklin Boulevard, (916) 454-4942, www.pangaeatwobrews.com.

The Shack: We (still) have a hard time figuring out when this spot is open. But that’s part of the charm. This pioneer of the local-brew scene still is a hot destination for California craft. 5201 Folsom Boulevard, (916) 457-5997, www.eastsacshack.com.

Samuel Horne’s Tavern: There are two ideal ways to enjoy Samuel Horne’s. 1. Ride the bike trail from downtown and rehydrate with excellent American-only craft brew.

2. Be lazy and take light rail to Old Town Folsom. This is one of the region’s top beer spots. 719 Sutter Street in Folsom, (916) 293-8207, www.samhornes.com.

Whole Foods Market: It’s true, the staff actually pours beer at the Whole Foods in Folsom. Which brings “Whole Paycheck” to the next level of brokeness. Double trouble: The bottle selection is Folsom’s finest, too. 270 Palladio Parkway in Folsom, (916) 984-8500, www.wholefoods market.com/stores/folsom. Ω

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For the week of February 27

A

h, les Français. Whether it’s the language, the food or the people, the French have a way with making everything beautiful. Even “Voulez-vous aller au cinéma?” sounds so much more enticing than “Want to go to the movies?” Oui, oui.

French films are usually artsier, quirkier and generally more interesting than what comes out of Hollywood. Though the big Sacramento French Film Festival is held every summer, there’s also a minifestival of short films to quench winter cravings.

On Friday, February 28, the festival presents its seventh Winter French Short Film Screening, which will be held in the Crest Theatre’s (1013 K Street) main auditorium, which is a first.

Both animated and live-action films are on tap, and lengths range from slightly more than 10 minutes to a little less than one hour. A highlight will surely

be Avant que de tout perdre (Just Before Losing Everything), which follows an abused woman and her children hiding in a grocery store. It nabbed an Oscar nomination for best short film, and the Los Angeles Times deemed it the most deserving of the win—a “roller-coaster ride” that “ticks for half an hour as if it could explode at any moment.”

Other selections include Les lézards, wherein two men wait restlessly in a steam room for an Internet date, and Mademoiselle Kiki et les Montparnos, an animated biopic of a model and muse for some of the most influential artists of the early 20th century.

Doors open at 6 p.m. for a reception with upbeat, French pop courtesy of DJ Christophe. Don’t forget the wine and pastis, a French anise-flavored liquor, to get you in the celebratory mood before the films start at 7 p.m. Tickets are $10 for general admission. Details are at www.sacramentofrenchfilmfestival.org.

—Janelle Bitker

wEEkLY PICkS

Il Trovatore Friday, February 28, and Sunday, March 2 The blockbuster of the Sacramento Opera and the Sacramento Philharmonic’s Two in Tune season, Giuseppi Verdi’s Il Trovatore is a twisted, operOPERA atic love story. It’s directed by Robert Tannenbaum, who recently announced his upcoming resignation as general director of the Sacramento Region Performing Arts Alliance, the joint organization between the opera and philharmonic. $16-$116, 8 p.m. on Friday, and 2 p.m. on Sunday at the Community Center Theater, 1301 L Street; (916) 808-2000; www.2intune.org.

Jim Jefferies: Day Streaming

2014 Sacramento Undy 5000

Winter Wine & Food Fest

Saturday, March 1

Saturday, March 1

Saturday, March 1

In between seasons of his original series Legit, Australian comedian Jim Jefferies COMEDY brings his comedy tour stateside. Irreverent, ranting and outright hilarious, everything is funnier in Jefferies’ accent. $37.50, 8 p.m. at the Crest Theatre, 1013 K Street; (916) 442-5189; www.jim jefferies.ning.com.

Remember that scene in Old School, where Will Ferrell’s character runs through the streets naked, yelling nonsense? The 2014 Sacramento Undy 5000 will be kind of like that, only slightly more covRACE ered up and for a good cause—colon-cancer research.

Run a 5k or participate in the 1-mile fun run. $20-$40, 9 a.m. at William Land Park, 4215 Freeport Boulevard; http://support.ccalliance.org.

The Make-A-Wish Foundation pretty much brought the Internet to its knees last year with its transformation of San Francisco into Gotham City for Miles, the @SFbatkid. Supporters of the foundation can sample food and wine from more than 100 regional purveyors, and FESTIVAL VIP ticket holders will get to witness the wish of a local kid come true. $85-$200, 5 p.m. at the Sacramento Convention Center, 1400 J Street; (916) 692-3928; http://necannv.wish.org.

—Jonathan Mendick

28 | SN&R | 02.27.14

—Jessica Rine

—Deena Drewis

—Deena Drewis

Sac-Con Sunday, March 2 Next week’s Sacramento Comic Con hosted by Wizard World might draw all the headlines (and star power, like Thor’s Chris Hemsworth), but Sac-Con is Sacto’s homegrown comic and anime convention. It started in CONVENTION 1986, and it’ll feature comics, games, authors, actors and cosplayers galore. $6-$10, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Scottish Rite Masonic Center, 6151 H Street; www.sac-con.com.

—Jonathan Mendick

n ow o p e n

wntown welcome to do

s i d a r a p

Eat as the Romans do

10

$

Roma’s Pizza & Pasta

Beer Week Combo

6530 Fair Oaks Boulevard in Carmichael, (916) 488-9800, www.romaspizzacarmichael.com Roma’s Pizza & Pasta is the fourth restaurant in the region opened by the Guerrera family.

Originally from Carlantino, Italy, the family by Jonathan first opened Roma’s Pizzeria on Franklin Mendick Boulevard in 1973, then Roma II Pizzeria on Folsom Boulevard in 1981, and Roma’s Pizzeria j o nathan m@ newsreview.c om III in the city of Folsom in 1994. After 16 years at that location, it moved to Carmichael in 2010 and became Roma’s Pizza & Pasta.

The eatery claims to serve “authentic Italian-style” food, but that’s only partially true in terms of its pizza. That’s because it rating: actually serves two types: a standard AmericanHHH style pizza with a doughy crust, and another one—which happens to be gluten-free—with a dinner for one: thinner crust, resembling a pie you might actu$10 - $20 ally find in Italy.

On one recent visit, I ordered a regular-crust pizza with pepperoni and jalapeños. The standard crust is the unusually thick kind you might expect on any American-style pie—chewy, but ultimately lacking in flavor. However, the tomato sauce made up for the dough, giving it a nice spicy kick. This restaurant also doesn’t H Flawed skimp on the toppings. In particular, the copious piling on the Giuseppe Special (tomatoHH has mOments based red sauce, mozzarella, mushrooms, salami, pepperoni, sausage, olives, linguica, HHH beef and green peppers) and the Healthy Pizza appealing (tomato sauce, mozzarella, diced tomatoes, HHHH garlic, artichoke, olive oil and oregano) helped authOritative soften the otherwise tough dough.

HHHHH On a subsequent visit I tried the gluten-free epiC pizza and was impressed by the dough. It’s similar to a Neapolitan pizza crust from Italy: incredibly thin and crispy like a cracker. It’s a lot lighter, and I almost finished my entire small artichoke-pepperoni-and-mushroom pizza in one sitting. This was by far the superior crust.

While not all Roma’s pies qualify as “authentic Italian-style,” its pasta does. It sticks to traditional dishes: spaghetti with various sauce options, lasagna, several stuffed pasta dishes and a baked cannelloni. During a pair of recent visits, I sampled both baked pasta dishes: the lasagna and the Cannelloni Veneziani Al Still hungry? Forno (baked cannelloni stuffed with meat, search sn&r’s eggs, ricotta and mozzarella cheeses). Both “dining directory” excelled in their simplicity, and the inclusion of to find local restaurants by name egg in each dish reminded me of carbonara—a or by type of food. popular Roman egg-based pasta dish that I once sushi, mexican, indian, ate in Italy about 10 years ago. The cannelloni italian—discover it also paired well with a glass of Chianti (Roma’s all in the “dining” section at has a handful of wines, all priced at less than www.news $20 per bottle, and the Peroni beer on draft is review.com. good with pizza, as well).

I made it a point to stop by for a few lunch specials, too. Served from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Tuesday through Friday, it’s $8.25 for a baked hot sandwich, plus a soup or salad. I tried the meatball sandwich (mozzarella, meatballs and red sauce) with a house-made minestrone soup, and a sub sandwich (salami, pepperoni, BEFORE

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NEWS

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F E AT U R E

ninkasi totalipa domination + m glass of premiu junmai sake

Canadian bacon, mozzarella and red sauce) with a Caesar salad. The meatball sandwich came out a bit plain, with very large, bready meatballs contributing to an overall lack of flavor. On the other hand, the sub sandwich’s flavor is wellbalanced, if not a bit decadent with its trio of spicy meats, melted cheese and marinara sauce.

I’d recommend the hearty and slightly spicy house-made minestrone over the uninspiring Caesar salad.

The sub sandwich’s flavor is well-balanced, if not a bit decadent with its trio of spicy meats, melted cheese and marinara sauce.

Sac’s first

japanese–italian fine dining fusion

826 J Street

Other notes: The several times I ate at Roma’s, it was either extremely busy or extremely quiet. One time, there was what seemed like an entire youth soccer league filling the restaurant. The three other times I visited, I was one of the only customers in the restaurant.

Nevertheless, servers were kind, and service was prompt on all visits. Overall, it’s a nice spot to have in the neighborhood to grab a quick sandwich, pasta dish or gluten-free pizza (a vegan pizza option is available, too). Ω

downtown sacramento (916) 341–0321

Roll the soup dice

Come nightfall, downtown’s Shine cafe becomes a cozy music venue. But the rest of the day it focuses on offering fodder for one’s mouth. The menu items are basically typical cafe fare—pastries, sandwiches, salads, soup—but what’s great is that most are vegan friendly, like the grilled-cheese sandwich made with Daiya jalapeño-garlic “cheese.” And the soup of the day, provided by Sugar Plum Vegan, whose baked goods are also sold there, is a delicious bet. Don’t pass up the seasonal favorite carrot curry flavor: To say it was colorfully spiced is like saying Rainbow Brite wears neutral tones.

Chunks of sweet potato and carrot in the coconut-milk creamy concoction is so worth $3.50 (for 8 ounces, plus grilled bread; the 16-ounce bowl is $5). Or maybe the West African peanut flavor will be offered the day you go? Roll the soup dice at 1400 E Street.

STORY

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Downtown Darna This Palestinian restaurant serves an excellent baba ghanoush that, instead of being blended into a smooth paste, is served chunky and studded with eggplant seeds. Its smoky, deep flavor is balanced out by a lemony brightness, and it’s good on the somewhat flabby pita bread with which it’s served, but it’s even better on the house-made za’atar bread. Chicken-breast kebabs are not particularly flavorful but have some char from the grill, while the falafel and chicken shawarma are underwhelming. Do order a side of tabbouleh salad, however. It’s pretty to look at—bright-green chopped parsley studded with white grains of bulgur—and tastes refreshing. Palestinian.

925 K St., (916) 447-7500. Dinner for one: $15-$25. HHH B.G.

Where to eat?

Here are a few recent reviews and regional recommendations by Becky Grunewald, Ann Martin Rolke, Garrett McCord and Jonathan Mendick, updated regularly.

Check out www.newsreview.com for more dining advice.

Downtown & Vine This tasting room and wine bar spotlights the local farm-to-glass movement.

Here, diners can order 2-ounce tasting flights of wine. Choose three from the same vintner to compare styles, or mix and match to contrast similar wines from regional wineries. Wines are also available in larger pours and by the bottle. Wine is meant to be enjoyed with food, of course: The menu offers a wide selection of tidbits and hearty dishes. Worth sampling: the goat-cheese stuffed peppers, chilled Spanish-spiced shrimp, and a cheddar-andapple melt. Or try the ambrosial Wine Country sandwich, with salty prosciutto, sweet fig jam, oozy mozzarella and peppery

arugula on grilled bread. There are also a variety of flatbreads loaded with topping combos like capicola, three cheeses, piquillo peppers and green onions. The bread for these comes across as more than a pizza trying to be fancy. American. 1200 K St., Ste. 8; (916) 228-4518. Dinner for one: $10-$15. HHHH AMR

Midtown The Coconut Midtown The food here travels a path between standard and inventive. Creamcheese wontons, for example, aren’t the epitome of culinary Southeast Asian traditions, but damn it if they aren’t delightful. Soft cream cheese and chives in a crispy wrapper and served with a sweet chili sauce?

Nothing wrong with that. The chicken larb—a spicy mincedmeat salad—is fragrant and intense. Mint, chilies, basil and iceberg lettuce are drenched in a spicy lime dressing punctuated with a heavy hand of fish sauce. The Coconut has warnings in its menu about which dishes are spicy, but unless you’re a newborn kitten, trembling and mewling, you might not even be aware of the chilies in your food. Thai. 2502 J St., (916) 447-1855. Dinner for one: $10-$15. HHH1/2 G.M.

Hook & Ladder Manufacturing Co. The restaurant, by the same owners as Midtown’s The Golden Bear, sports a firefighting theme (a ladder on the ceiling duct work, shiny silver wallpaper with a rat-andhydrant motif) and a bar setup

that encourages patrons to talk to each other. An interesting wine list includes entries from Spain and Israel; there are also draft cocktails and numerous beers on tap. The brunch menu is heavy on the eggs, prepared in lots of ways. One option is the Croque Madame, a hamand-Gruyere sandwich usually battered with egg. This one had a fried egg and béchamel, with a generous smear of mustard inside. The mountain of potato hash alongside tasted flavorful and not too greasy. The menu also features pizzas and house-made pastas, but one of its highlights includes an excellent smoked-eggplant baba ghanoush, which is smoky and garlicky. The bananas foster bread pudding is equally transcendent. American. 1630 S St., (916) 442-4885. Dinner for one: $20-$40. HHH1/2 AMR

it all together for an addictive and satisfying lunch. One of Thai Basil’s true highlights is its homemade curry pastes. These balanced constructions of basil, lemongrass, shallots, chilies, kaffir lime leaves and other ingredients, when roasted, have been known to drive hungry Sacramentans into a berserk craze. Service here is impeccable. Thai Basil has earned its reputation. Thai. 2431 J St., (916) 442-7690. Dinner for one: $10-$20. HHHH G.M.

Land Park/ Curtis Park Spice Kitchen The menu here has a few tangential dishes like pad thai, but it’s mostly focused on Japanese cuisine, with a side menu of Chinese-American favorites. Tasty options include the vegetable tempura, lightly fried with slices of Japanese sweet potato and yams. If you want ramen, the hot soup dish these days, try the red tonkotsu version: It’s served with lots of nicely chewy noodles, spinach and the requisite soft-boiled egg. Spice Kitchen also serves bento boxes in lunch and dinner portions for a good price. Here, diners get soup, rice, salad and tempura, as well as a meat of choice. Japanese. 1724 Broadway, (916) 492-2250. Dinner for one: $10-$15. HHH AMR

Thai Basil SN&R readers consistently vote this place among the city’s top Thai restaurants for this paper’s annual Best of Sacramento issue. And for good reason. The restaurant’s tom yum soup may be one of the best foods served in the City of Trees. It features an incredibly savory broth with layers of flavor. Likewise, the tom kha gai—a coconut-broth soup—is a veritable panacea against Delta winds. Salads make up a large part of Thai cuisine and should not be overlooked. Larb gai consists of simple shredded chicken over mixed greens, cucumber and tomatoes. Fresh mint and a chili-laden dressing heavy with fish sauce and vigorous squeezes of lime juice pull

Midtown

French

at

East Sac Cielito Lindo Mexican Gastronomy Instead of cheese-blanketed entrees, diners here can order

Bistro

upscale dishes such as enchiladas de mole: tortillas wrapped around amazingly moist, flavorful chicken, bathed in a housemade mole poblano. The sauce has a million wonderful flavors.

The portions here are quite generous. A green salad with fruits and nuts was big enough for a meal, even without the optional meat or seafood topping. The restaurant’s empanaditas de salpicon con papas are little turnovers standing up amid a drizzle of ancho sauce. The crust features a bit of leavening that makes it both crunchy and fluffy. The filling of beef, potatoes and vegetables tastes wellflavored and a bit spicy. Or try the tacos de arrachera—three soft tortillas enclose marinated strips of meltingly good steak, topped with roasted poblano chilies, lots of fresh cilantro and crema. They’re drippy, but worth every napkin. The menu is meatcentric, but the kitchen is vegetarian friendly as well. The crema de rajas poblanas, fully vegan and similar to a Mexican minestrone, is full of chickpeas, poblanos and onions in a rich broth uniquely flavored with vanilla and epazote. Mexican.

3672 J St., (916) 736-2506. Dinner for one: $20-$25. HHHH AMR

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popular destination for kids’ sports teams and birthday parties also caters to adult diners with good food and healthy options, such as organic whole-wheat crusts. Glutenfree and vegan choices are also available. With a texture closer to Chicago style than New York style, the pizzas are tasty but quite filling. Choose from house-made sauces and fresh toppings, or pick from one of the inventively named presets.

The Old Lady is especially good, with pesto, potatoes, spinach, lots of veggies and a zingy balsamic drizzle. The biggest secret here, though, is the barbecue. Wicked West delivers with shredded, tender meat that’s lightly smoky and tossed with a vinegar-based sauce. The pork ribs are dry-rubbed and toothsome, while the tri-tip is well cooked but leans toward a dry texture. The chicken is rubbed with olive oil and herbs and rotisserie-smoked to produce a moist and juicy result.

the only place in town that serves niu rou jian bing (sliced beef rolls)—a specialty of northern China—and the ones at Yang’s hit the spot. This is basically the Chinese version of a burrito: meat (thinly sliced

Cassoulet / Escargot • Largest selection of rare cheeses • Authentic French preparation •

th

Wicked West Pizza & BBQ This

Yang’s Noodles This is perhaps

14th & O Street

Bistro Michel

West Sacramento

South Sac

Paris at your doorstep...

Serving Brunch Saturday & Sunday

beef marinated in soy sauce) plus veggies (diced green onion, cucumber and cilantro) wrapped in a large, flat carbohydrate crepe (a thin pancake made out of flour, water and green onion). Elsewhere on the menu, Yang’s eponymous noodles are homemade, alkaline and chewy. Chinese.

5860 Stockton Blvd., (916) 392-9988. Dinner for one: $10-$15. HHHH J.M.

1402 Broadway 916.930.0888

CITRUS HEIGHTS 5623 Sunrise Blvd.

916.961.6888

Sun-Thurs 11am-10pm • Fri & Sat 11am-10:30pm

PARTY ROOMS AVAILABLE • NOW SERVING BEER & WINE

China Buffet

chinabuffetrestaurant.com

Arden/ Carmichael El Forastero Mexican Food The menu here resembles the type of Mexican food found in Southern California: a blend of American fast food, Tex-Mex and traditional Mexican dishes.

There’s menudo on weekends, but also french fries hiding inside burritos and buried underneath steaming piles of carne asada.

For a taco or torta filling, try the adobada, a pork marinated in a red chili sauce. Or, try two of the most famous San Diego-style Mexican dishes, both delicious but full of calories: the California burrito and carne asada fries.

The latter consists of a plate of fries topped with carne asada, cheese, sour cream and guacamole. A California burrito is basically an order of carne asada fries wrapped in a tortilla— which, surprisingly, isn’t even the fattiest-sounding dish on the menu. That distinction most likely belongs to the hangovercuring Super Breakfast burrito, with bacon, chorizo, ham, fries, eggs and cheese—all wrapped in a tortilla. It’s incredibly hearty.

Mexican. 5116 Fair Oaks Blvd. in Carmichael, (916) 488-1416.

Dinner for one: $5-$10.

HHH1/2 J.M.

FreshMed Mediterranean Cuisine This restaurant broadens the definition of “Mediterranean.”

In addition to the usual

options—gyros, hummus, falafel, etc.—it also serves dishes from a wide range of cultures. For example, FreshMed offers a $6 Indian and Pakistani lunch buffet. Selections include stir-fried eggplant; curried chickpeas, lentils; and a creamy, spicy and hearty chicken tikka masala.

Regular menu items include baba ghanoush, which tasted a bit bitter, and chicken kebab.

The Mediterranean Nacho and chicken panini are examples of what the restaurant does well: culinary mashups that aren’t derivative, but instead rely heavily on flavor and innovation.

The paninis are standouts: The bread is sweet, thicker than one might expect, and pressed nicely on a grill, with char marks on both sides. Mediterranean.

1120 Fulton Ave., Ste. I; (916) 486-1140. Dinner for one: $10-$20. HHH1/2 J.M.

North Highlands Kim Son Mongolian BBQ Vietnamese & Chinese Food It’s difficult to

Stirling Bridges Restaurant and Pub This British- and Scottishthemed gastropub offers an adequate beer selection and an extensive menu that goes beyond standard deep-fried pub fare. Try the Irish onion soup, a French onion-styled soup kicked up with Irish whiskey and Guinness beer. Or order the house-made veggie burger—it’s one of the tastiest black-bean patties around. The most unusual dish on the menu is the Scottish Mafia Pizza. Topped with turkey pastrami, potatoes, cabbage and Swiss cheese, it falls short with its too many flat flavors to actually benefit from their unusual pairing. Thankfully, there’s Tabasco sauce on the table. Pub. 5220 Manzanita Ave.

5

$

samosas are a meal in and of themselves. It is highly recommended that you slather these with spicy chutney and seasoned raita. The chana masala here is one of the best dishes by far. It usually tends to feature a strong butter taste but is actually cooked with canola oil here—it’s vegan—and the tenderness of the chickpeas as well as the punch of the ginger and coriander makes it worth returning for. Indian. 207 Third St. in Davis, (530) 753-9664. Dinner for one: Less than $10. HHH1/2 G.M.

in Carmichael, (916) 331-2337.

Dinner for one: $10-$20.

HHH1/2 J.M.

rate Mongolian barbecue by regular reviewing standards, because it’s the diner who chooses the ingredients and seasoning and then gives them to the chef to prepare. But here’s what Kim Son does well: It stocks plenty of fresh veggies; thin slices of meat; thick, chewy chow mein noodles; about a dozen sauces (including cooking wine, ginger, teriyaki, and Sriracha sauces); and additional toppings (sesame seeds, minced garlic).

Want to stick to the menu? Try the Kim Son Spicy Beef, seasoned with sha cha jiang, a sauce composed of minced garlic, chili, shrimp and other seasonings: It’s the best dish from an otherwise lackluster menu of Chinese food. Chinese. 4980 Watt Ave. in North Highlands, (916) 331-8188. Dinner for one: $10-$15.

HHH1/2 J.M.

IllustratIon by Mark stIvers

Pizza/Barbecue. 3160 Jefferson Blvd. in West Sacramento, (916) 572-0572. Dinner for one: $5-$10.

HHH AMR

Auburn Carpe Vino This quaint wine shop

Davis Raja’s Tandoor This place has long been a favorite with the area’s student population, thanks to its lunch buffet featuring multiple vegan and vegetarian options (dinner at Raja’s also won’t disappoint, by the way). The potato-and-pea

and restaurant boasts excellent service and food. Try the musque de Provence pumpkin soup—it’s lighter than your wallet will be when you leave, but one bite and wallet be damned. The flavor is exquisite with whispers of vanilla and pops of pumpkin seed. A ciderbrined pork chop, bejeweled in bacon and prune and sitting atop a bed of savoy cabbage, defies expectations. A quartet of lamb meatballs corseted in harissa, mint sauce and yogurt is surely the dish to convert anyone who (confusedly) refuses lamb. The restaurant—being primarily a wine bar—does not serve anyone under the age of 21. Those of a legal drinking age, rejoice, for there will be no parent cooing to a child to settle down. American.

1568 Lincoln Way in Auburn, (530) 823-0320. Dinner for one: $50-$75. HHHHH G.M.

A different kind of food truck

A lot of Sacramentans visit farmers markets for the fresh produce. It’s not only a cheaper alternative to the supermarket, but in many cases, the produce comes from small organic farms, and it’s often better for the farmer because it cuts out the middleman. But what about buying farm-fresh meat from another source? That’s a market a Spokane, Wash., company called Zaycon Foods is trying to explore and expand into numerous cities including Sacramento. Since 2009, its been hosting “sales events,” which are essentially pop-up shops featuring trucks full of various farm-fresh meats—chicken breast, smoked bacon, steak, turkey breast—parked in church parking lots. Sometimes there are produce items such as strawberries, peaches and milk as well. The consumer visits the website (www.zayconfoods.com), places an order, heads to a prearranged pop-up location and grabs the meat or produce from a truck.

—Jonathan Mendick

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Yes, high school is useful for socialization and to ensure a baseline of knowledge in society. But it is not a predictor of future success for everyone. the underlying reason for a student’s struggle. Those reasons might be unreasonable expectations, unresolved emotional trauma, mentalhealth issues, or a unique brain and talent not designed to sync with mainstream education.

Some parents treat grade-point averages as tea leaves and attempt to predict the future (“You’ll never get into college!� “You’ll never get a good job!�). Teens are savvy enough to suspect that Mom or Dad is lying (’cause if a parent can predict the future, that parent’s life would be different). So the teen is torn between loyalty to his or her feelings (“I hate this class/school/teacher,� “I’m not a loser�) and loyalty to a parent who lies. A lying parent teaches a teen that lying is permissible if it gets you what you want.

But when that teen employs this

Got a problem?

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Give your name, telephone number (for verification purposes only) and question—all correspondence will be kept strictly confidential.

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learned manipulation in conversation with the same parent, that adult is appalled to be lied to. Crazy, huh?

Plenty of people who refused to fit into the boxes required for success in high school, or who were simply unable to do so, have found success in careers, creativity and social justice once graduated. Yes, high school is useful for socialization and to ensure a baseline of knowledge in society. But it is not a predictor of future success for everyone, not academically or socially or careerwise. Heck, even the SAT has lost that crown in the last five years.

The truth is that teens require individual attention to mature into the glorious beings the world needs.

Schools burden teachers with excessive busywork, and mostly useless meetings, leaving little time or energy to deal with a student’s real needs: how to manage their interior and exterior lives. No wonder so many small charter schools have popped up and are trying to fill the gaps that other public and private schools neglect.

So that’s the big picture of the system your son is languishing in and why he is struggling. The system is a bad fit for your son because it is losing its ability to care for individuals as well as the whole.

Here’s how to help: Celebrate your son’s innate genius (every child has this). Show him that a data-driven education system has no power to measure genius. Do not tell him that you will be sad if he doesn’t find his passion. A teen can’t receive that information without feeling guilty.

Plus, it could result in his unwillingness to tell you other things that he thinks might cause you sadness.

Instead, just say you want to help him find his passion, and follow that up with activities and excursions designed to do so. Ί

Meditation of the Week “When the door is closed, you must  learn to slide across the crack of the  sill,� says an African proverb. How  creative are you when faced with  obstacles to your dreams? 

  F E AT U R E

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My 16–year-old son doesn’t do well in school and does not have enough credits to graduate. The principal, guidance counselor and I are trying to help him prepare for his GED test. He has always been such a great kid, very nice and polite, but the problems with school have caused him grief. Last year, he starting saying “I hate my life� a lot and experimented with marijuana.

by Joey ga I’m really hoping that the GED rcia focus will relieve academic pressure so he can love his a s kj oey @ ne wsreview.c om life again. If he has a career in anything he is interested in, I Joey will be very proud. But if he ends up is committed to being a nobody that doesn’t find his lifelong learning and passion, I will be sad. I have been a being sassy. single dad since he was 4 years old.

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Congratulations on being a compassionate parent who wants the best for his son. Many parents respond to circumstances like yours by berating their son or daughter, trying to frighten the teen into scoring better grades. The scared-straight method of parenting fails to tackle

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Now playiNg

Passion

1

Better late than never. Stephen Sondheim’s Passion netted multiple Tony Awards when it premiered in New York in 1994. But it is only now that by Jeff Hudson we’re seeing a local production. Sacramento’s Music Circus has never gone in big for Sondheim. And let’s be fair, Passion is a chamber piece that probably wouldn’t translate well in the vast 2,000-seat Wells Fargo Pavilion.

But Passion is an excellent choice for the 90-seat New Helvetia Theatre, where artistic director Connor Mickiewicz has been staging marvelous compact (and thrifty) productions of prizewinning musicals on the darker and artier side. Sometimes good things come in small packages.

4

PHoTo by Mike yee

Passion, 8 p.m.

Thursday, Friday; 2 p.m and 8 p.m.

Saturday; $30.

New Helvetia Theatre, 1028 R Street; (916) 469-9850; www.newhelvetia.org.

Through March 8.

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The Wild Party

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The joint’s a-rockin’ with the adult-themed bohemian debauchery of the eponymous wild party in Green Valley Theatre Company’s shimmering, shaking, humping production of Andrew Lippa’s 2000 Drama Desk Awardwinning play based on an obscene poem from the Roaring ’20s.

That doesn’t mean it’s not a breathtaking show—just make sure you’ve brought along the heart medicine if you bring grandma with you, and most definitely leave the kids at home.

Directed by Christopher Cook, who also conducts the fine orchestra, The Wild Party is the product of a disintegrating relationship between burlesque stripper Queenie (Andrea St. Clair, with a powerful stage presence) and vaudeville clown Burrs (the amazing Jacob Montoya, who gives new meaning to the term “scary clown”). Queenie plots retaliation for Burrs’ insult to her by embarrassing him at their party. Her plan derails when Kate (Lindsay Grimes, playing a woman of low morals with a heart that beats for Burrs) brings the mysterious Black (Ryan Allen, who plays tall and handsome with a heavy dose of hopeful) with her. As Queenie and Black’s flirtation deepens, Kate tries unsuccessfully to woo Burrs, and the party—with guests from all the wild walks of life—evolves into a booze, coke and sex-fueled orgy.

This cannot end well, of course.

Fortunately, the power of the four lead performers—not to mention their pipes and dance moves—make the inevitable result of mixing jealousy and excess worthy of our time. Add in some fantastic production numbers choreographed by Carly Sisto, a couple of songs worth humming for days after (particularly the borderline-blasphemous “A Wild, Wild Party”), Green Valley’s usual topnotch production standards and energy, and it all totals a bathtub full of gin-soaked entertainment for the adults-only crowd.

WeLL-DoNe

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Gee’s Bend

Playwright Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder pieces together small vignettes to create a larger tapestry of a family’s life—fitting for a play about patchwork quilts. The play presents three stages in the life of Sadie. We first meet her as a teenager in 1939, follow her through marriage and motherhood in 1965 and finally, see her as a proud elder sage in 2002. The story is told subtlety, through its characters’ experiences, so we

SUbLiMe–DoN’T MiSS

see how the history of slavery, the lack of choices for women and men of color and the fight for equality affect those who lived it. Eliza Hendrix as Sadie is a joy to watch as she captures the spirit of a woman struggling to find herself. Th, F, Sa 8pm; Su 2pm.

Through 3/1. $8-$15. Celebration Arts, 4469 D St.; (916) 455-2787; www.celebrationarts.net. P.R.

Short review by Patti Roberts.

Alors on danse.

Dance evolution For 30 years, Stephen Petronio has been making moving art with other people’s bodies. Collaborating with composer Son Lux, visual artist Janine Antoni and lighting designer Ken Tabachnick, Like Lazarus Did is a touring full-length dance performance inspired by traditional tales of rebirth and transformation. The New Yorkbased company members push their bodies, revealing themes of sacrifice, death and rebirth through cutting-edge contemporary dance. Petronio has made a name for himself in his ability to move dancers through space, utilizing speed, partnering techniques and fast-paced footwork, creating ordered chaos and showing elegance in the recklessness that is human emotion. The performance will feature a live choir and will include a Q-and-A session moderated by Lorelei Bayne, an associate professor and vice chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance at Sacramento State University. Friday, February 28, at 8 p.m.; $25-$54. Mondavi Center, 9399 Old Davis Road in Davis; (866) 754-2787; www.stephenpetronio.com.

—Kel Munger

The Wild Party, 8 p.m. Friday, Saturday; 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Sunday; 8 p.m. Thursday, March 6; $18. Green Valley Theatre Company at the Grange Performing Arts Center, 3823 V Street; (916) 736-2664; http://greenvalleytheatre.com. Through March 9.

STORY

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Gee’s Bend: Quilted goodness.

PHoTo CoURTeSy oF THe MoNDAVi CeNTeR

“Dark” is a descriptor oft applied to Sondheim. And Passion (which includes the line “Unhappiness can be seductive”) is quirky, even by his standards. The setting is 19th-century Italy, where handsome soldier Giorgio (Matt Surges) is posted to a drab mountain garrison—separating him from hot love interest Clara (Courtney Glass) in Milan. Soon, Giorgio meets Fosca (Jackie Vanderbeck)—as a perpetually ailing, twitchy recluse who obsessively presses for Giorgio’s affection. It’s a complicated, warped, manipulative relationship (this is Sondheim, after all). But by the end, Fosca does not seem quite so crazed.

Vanderbeck (who played the equally reclusive Emily Dickinson at Sacramento Theatre Company a while back) is on top of her game as Fosca, and Surges makes Giorgio’s gradual shift of romantic allegiance believable; Glass floats through regretfully as the distance between Clara and Giorgio grows.

Sondheim’s score is elegantly beautiful—much

The darker, artier side of crazy.

FoUL

closer to “art music” than up-tempo Broadway.

The singers are backed by a spare but effective combination of piano (Graham Sobelman) and percussion (Brian Manchen). Several supporting actors do well in cameos. Mickiewicz stages this strange love story sensitively, quietly and convincingly, without intermission. Ω

—Jessica Rine

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Sacramento Vedanta Reading Group

Back in the USSR

Every Friday 7:00 - 8:30 pm · Free admission Sacramento Yoga Center @ Sierra 2 Community Center, Room 6 2791 24th Street, Sacramento Parking in back

Stalingrad The whole world is your own.

— Sri Sarada Devi

For more information please see www.SacVRG.org

In the last years of his life, Sergio Leone longed to make a gigantic, probably unfilmable epic about the long, bloody siege of Stalingrad during World by Daniel Barnes War II. It was to be a period piece even grander in scope than Leone’s own sublime four-hour epic Once Upon a Time in America, and he hoped to open the film with a half-hourlong tracking shot traversing the entire city in one unbroken take.

Director Fedor Bondarchuk’s Stalingrad is deliberately more limited in its scope than Leone’s foggy notion, and a long, satellite zoomout near the end reminds us that it depicts only a

4

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minor skirmish in the midst of infinite carnage.

But as the first Russian film shot in 3-D, the ambitions of Stalingrad are as mercenary as they are artistic. More than drawing inspiration from the cultural invasiveness of Hollywood’s bombast, Stalingrad wants to stand next to, and even surpass, their PG-13 thrills.

It succeeds in many ways, even if the “Burn in hell, scum!” rhetoric occasionally makes Stalingrad feel like a Russian-language reboot of Nation’s Pride, the propaganda film-within-afilm from Inglourious Basterds. However, unlike the American-produced propaganda purveyed by Michael Bay, Peter Berg and Roland Emmerich, Stalingrad hides a tender soul amid the omnipresent CGI and Gladiator-style fight scenes.

There is more of Paul Verhoeven’s cynical weirdness in Stalingrad than there is Zack Snyder’s slate-colored humorlessness.

Bondarchuk and screenwriters Ilya Tilkin and Sergey Snezhkin even include a subplot suspiciously similar to the main story of Verhoeven’s underrated 2006 film Black Book. They also tend to emphasize moments of grace as much as they revel in cinematic slaughter—a makeshift birthday party with scavenged gifts that could have come from John Ford’s WWII-era film They Were Expendable.

Bondarchuk and cinematographer Maksim Osadchiy-Korytkovskiy’s images are viscerally beautiful right from the opening shots of an airplane descending into a Japanese city

devastated by the 2011 tsunami. These powerful images set up a bold and bizarre framing device, as a faceless Russian aid worker tells the story of his mother’s life during the Stalingrad siege in order to soothe trapped German tourists.

After that striking pretitle sequence, the film flashes back to 1942 at the height of the Nazi siege. In a debt to Saving Private Ryan, Stalingrad starts with a massive, unimaginably bloody battle and gets increasingly insular and terrified in the aftermath. A group of Russian scouts are sent on a mission across the Volga River to prepare for a counteroffensive against the Nazis. When the plan fails, a handful of Russian soldiers hide out in an apartment, where they set up sniper rifles and try to protect the civilians.

From there, Stalingrad becomes an ensemble drama with flashes of violent action, as the Russian soldiers befriend a pretty survivor named Katya.

She turns out to be the mother of the Russian aid worker and narrator from the opening, and one by one, we get insights into the prewar lives of each soldier. These scenes are sometimes moving but also overly contrived—for example, one of the soldiers was a successful tenor who now refuses to speak.

The Nazi leader is played

by Thomas Kretschmann, best known for also playing a Nazi in films such as Downfall, Valkyrie, The Pianist, Eichmann and many other movies. It’s a strange lot to be typecast as a Nazi sadist, and perhaps the handsome and talented Kretschmann would rather be known for his Richard III than his Eichmann, but work is work.

Whatever the case, Kretschmann is close to brilliant here as Kapitan Kan, finding deep-seated sinews of human longing and dementia in this pitiless scumbag, much like Michael Fassbender did in 12 Years a Slave.

Stalingrad hides a tender soul amid the omnipresent CGI and Gladiator-style fight scenes.

It’s not a flawless picture, and is clearly stitched together from any number of more broad-shouldered influences. However, in addition to the solid action and serviceable drama, Stalingrad offers images of grisly awe (flame-covered Russian soldiers getting mowed down by machine-gun fire), sick humor (a fatally stabbed Nazi commander laments that the only thing he can feel are the lice in his armpits), doomed tenderness (the birthday-party scene) and some risky narrative leaps. Ω

by daniel barnes & JiM lane

1

3 Days to Kill

•

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Although the revolting 3 Days to Kill is basically a revamp of French au-turd Luc Besson’s lousy 2013 film The Family, this movie is so awful it makes The Family seem good enough to have not been based on a Besson script. As supposedly directed by McG, 3 Days to Kill stars Kevin Costner as grizzled CIA killer-for-hire Ethan Renner. After learning he has inoperable cancer, Ethan reunites with his estranged wife and daughter, but a mysterious agent (Amber Heard, playing one of the most asinine characters in recent memory) lures him back with the promise of a life-saving cure. Ethan’s ex-wife divorced him out of mortal fear, yet she immediately departs for a business trip the second he shows up, leaving her only daughter with this near-stranger and career murderer. “She’s a good mother,” growls Ethan. Agree to disagree! D.B.

3

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4

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The Monuments Men

The U.S. Army’s Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Section, tasked during World War II with preserving culture and retrieving millions of artworks stolen by the Nazis, is somehow turned into a movie in praise of stars Matt Damon and George Clooney (the latter also directed and co-wrote with Grant Heslov, from Robert M. Edsel and Bret Witter’s book), making the section’s fine work look like a 1940s prequel to Ocean’s 11. It also reduces the 400 workers from 13 nations to a handful of Americans (John Goodman, Bill Murray, Bob Balaban) with a few token Europeans (Cate Blanchett, Hugh Bonneville, Jean Dujardin). False notes abound— words to a song that weren’t written until 1954, music that sounds like the theme from The Andy Griffith Show—and, as usual, Clooney’s preening vanity gives him all the best lines. J.L.

4

The Past

2

Pompeii

Although The Past is set in France instead of his native Iran, writerdirector Asghar Farhadi’s follow-up to his 2011 film A Separation deals with many of the same themes, most notably the seismic ripple effects of a dissolved marriage. The Past is an even slower starter and maintains a lower flame than A Separation, and the film is so unfocused on narrative immediacy that it evolves into an existential mystery before the viewer even comprehends it. Therefore, the impact of The Past may not be immediate as with its predecessor, but it could prove to have the longer emotional reach. Something chains each one of Farhadi’s characters to a past they regret but can never reclaim, even as they appeal to bureaucratic systems to redefine their existences. It all develops into a moral whodunit, with everyone obsessively circling around a tragic event that Farhadi never shows us. D.B.

In the doomed city of the ancient Roman Empire, a Celtic gladiator (Kit Harington) falls for a freeborn woman (Emily Browning) who has also caught the eye of a powerful senator (Kiefer Sutherland). Lee and Janet Scott Batchler’s script flaunts its ignorance of history (“OK,” says one slave. Elsewhere, Browning snaps, “I’m a citizen of Pompeii!” No, honey, you’re a citizen of Rome who lives in Pompeii). The model here isn’t Roman history, it’s James Cameron’s Titanic—but Harington isn’t Leonardo DiCaprio and Browning isn’t Kate Winslet (at least Sutherland isn’t Billy Zane). Director Paul W.S. Anderson strains credulity by having Harington defeat foe after foe, each of whom outweighs him by a good 30 pounds. The final destruction is enjoyably cheesy—and that’s really all we came to see anyway. J.L.

Lone Survivor

In 2005, a team of Navy SEALs (Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch, Ben Foster) drops into the Afghan mountains to ambush a high-level Taliban warlord—but are ambushed themselves, unable to call in air support or rescue. Based on a real operation, the movie has grueling scenes of combat, some of the most realistic and harrowing ever seen.

But writer-director Peter Berg and writer Patrick Robinson (adapting the memoir by Marcus Luttrell, the “lone survivor” of the title) never get around to establishing the characters as individuals. This makes the closing array of names rather confusing. Besides, the title is the ultimate spoiler, so there’s little suspense.

We know only one will survive, and since only Wahlberg is billed above the title … J.L.

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In 19th-century France, a sexually frustrated wife (Elizabeth Olsen) conspires with her lover (Oscar Isaac) to murder her sickly husband (Tom Felton), only to sink into a morass of guilt and recrimination. Adapted by director Charlie Stratton from the play by Neal Bell and Émile Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin, the movie’s plot may be familiar by now, thanks to films noir such as Double Indemnity and Body Heat—but, after all, Zola can probably claim to have invented it. In any case, in Stratton’s hands it makes a fine psychological study, with a sharp eye for its historical period and first-rate performances all around, especially from Olsen and Jessica Lange (as her domineering mother-in-law), with strong support from Shirley Henderson, Matt Lucas, Mackenzie Crook and John Kavanagh as friends and neighbors. J.L.

The Lego Movie

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- Richard Roeper, RICHARD ROEPER.COM

FOR ADVANCE TICKETS CALL FANDANGO @ 1-800-FANDANGO #2721

Endless Love

BEFORE

- Rex Reed, NEW YORK OBSERVER

BOLSHOI LOST ILLUSIONS 3/4 @ 7:00PM

About Last Night

Given the many cinematic atrocities that have been produced by Hasbro in recent years, it is completely understandable to approach The Lego Movie with a certain amount of suspicion and dread. However, this is as wildly imaginative and fun as any film you’re likely to see this year, even if it is based entirely on corporate synergy. Written and directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs), The Lego Movie concerns a lonely conformist (Chris Pratt, extremely personable) mistaken for a prophecy-fulfilling rebel savior. The film never takes its mumbo-jumbo seriously, opting instead to focus on giddily anarchic comedy, a childlike sense of visual invention, and a copyright-protected wet dream of supporting players. The only missteps are made in the third act, as that childlike wonder is literalized, and madness is sacrificed at the altar of lesson-learning. D.B.

2

“MASTERPIECE!”

GLORIA PHILOMENA NEBRASKA

Historically accurate tongue kissing.

Franco Zeffirelli’s 1981 Endless Love, an overheated teen soaper starring Brooke Shields and Martin Hewitt, is easily the least regarded of the three 1980s movies whose remakes were released into theaters last weekend. Directed by Shana Feste (Country Strong), Endless Love feels like a better-thanaverage episode of a CW drama that should have been canceled years ago, but it’s also watchable page-turning trash with a few solid performances. British actors Alex Pettyfer and Gabriella Wilde play the stereotypical “sweet bad boy” and “rich good girl,” and while both performers come off as callow and unworldly, with the coltishly beautiful Wilde it feels more like an actor’s choice. The reliably awful Pettyfer just lacks charisma and screen presence, and he practically distills into vapor any time he is forced to share the screen with a crafty veteran like Bruce Greenwood or Robert Patrick. D.B.

4

WED/THUR: 11:45AM, 2:15, 4:45, 7:15, 9:40PM FRI-TUES: 1:10, 5:30, 9:50PM NO TUES 5:30PM

“POWERFUL AND PERFECT.”

- A.O. Scott, NEW YORK TIMES

Two attractive singles (Michael Ealy, Joy Bryant) get fixed up by their best friends (Kevin Hart, Regina Hall), and a one-night stand turns serious: love, move in, crisis, break up.

Meanwhile, each huddles up periodically with his or her pal to puzzle over dealing with the opposite sex. Directed by Steve Pink and written by Leslye Headland, this remake of the 1986 Demi Moore and Rob Lowe movie (both loosely based on David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago) is a rueful Valentine candy box, blithely profane, but essentially sweet and very funny. Ealy and Bryant are appealing, though they mainly play straight-man to Hart and Hall.

Hart’s staccato schtick plays much better in a supporting role, and Hall matches him line for yammering line. They’re hilarious: This could be the beginning of a great rom-com team. J.L.

3

“CAUTIONARY TALE OF OBSESSION, ADULTERY AND REVENGE.”

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Sacramento Legal Line

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and press a 4-digit code

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Ride Along

A motor-mouthed security guard and cop wannabe (Kevin Hart) wants to prove to his girlfriend’s cop brother (Ice Cube) that he’s worthy of both the girl and the force, so he rides along with him on patrol. Your reaction to this semilame action comedy will depend on your tolerance for Hart’s line of profanely caffeinated patter; for some of us, a little goes a long way.

When the story is as predictable as this one with nothing to take your mind of Hart’s constant yapping, it’s enough to set your teeth on edge.

Ice Cube’s character strikes an attitude of angry exasperation toward his unwanted partner, leading one to wonder if the actor may have felt the same way on the set. It would be hard to blame him if he did. J.L.

3

RoboCop

2

That Awkward Moment

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It does not seem possible that a PG-13 remake of Paul Verhoeven’s ultraviolent 1987 sci-fi action masterpiece RoboCop could retain any of the original’s mordant multimedia satire, much less its gleefully bleak vision of a near-future urban hell. So, perhaps this shiny new RoboCop is the best RoboCop we could possibly expect at this moment. Director José Padilha’s gift for stylizing boot-level action scenes; a game, supporting cast; and an updated special-effects shimmer are almost enough to forgive that the film crumbles in the second half. The most disappointing aspect is the cleanliness of Padilha’s moral lines, nothing like the schizophrenic satire of Verhoeven’s film, which blurred the boundary between decrying sadism and psychotically reveling in it. This RoboCop spends so much time exploring the sensitive-dad side of its cyborg-peacekeeper protagonist that we’re practically into the third act before the story starts. D.B.

Two single dudes (Zac Efron, Miles Teller) and their divorce-bound pal (Michael B. Jordan) swear off serious relationships with women—but each of them quickly backslides into what might develop into a real romance.

This flimsy update of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost was written and directed by Tom Gormican, whose experience consists of only two pictures, including this one. Gormican shows aptitude, but apparently it’s more from paying attention in screenwriting class than from observing people in real life: His script is so arch and self-consciously clever that the jokes sound stale even as we hear them for the first time. Efron and Teller do what they can (Jordan is underused), but the women make a stronger impression: Imogen Poots as Efron’s match and (especially) Mackenzie Davis as Teller’s. J.L.

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Celebrating 80 years same family sinCe 1934

The buddy system

saCram ento

Folk singer Tom Brosseau and Crossbill Records founder Michael Leahy reflect on 10 years of friendship

beer week - feb 27 thru march 9 4pm-12am weekdays 6pm-12am saturday

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Corner of 10th & S Streets

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Tom Brosseau (pictured) and Crossbill Records label founder Michael Leahy prove that it takes two. Except for in this photo, where one’s all we got.

Catch Tom Brosseau at 8:30 p.m. on Friday, February 28, at the Veterans Memorial Theatre, located at 203 E. 14th Street in Davis. The cover is $12.50-$15.

Check out www.tom brosseau.com for more about the musician.

38 | SN&R | 02.27.14

instead. If the effort proved fruitless, Leahy said, then get back to him.

“I think Michael would have taken the record anyway,” Brosseau says now. “But I feel like he knew I’d learn something from shopping it around again.”

And so Brosseau obliged, but ultimately brought it back to Leahy.

“There was some interest, but it felt like to me, in the end, it belonged on Crossbill,” he says.

“Why continue to search when the answer was right there all along?”

Leahy formed Crossbill Records, also home to artists such as Sea of Bees and Silver Darling, in 2005—a year after he first met Brosseau. Now, he describes the release of the folk singer’s Grass Punks album as a lifelong dream.

“The Brass Bed record sold well, so with funds from that I was able to reinvest in getting the Grass Punks record going.

It’s become our most ambitious record yet,” Leahy says.

So what, exactly, most struck Leahy about Late Night at Largo—that record that started this journey a decade ago?

Troubled to remember his favorite cuts, Leahy reached for his copy of the album, the signed one that reads, “Mike, thanks so much for supporting my music. yours very truly, Tom Brosseau. September 30, 2004.”

“My little inflated deejay ego was immediately pumped. I’m getting a personal note from a songwriter,” Leahy remembers.

There was another connection, too, he says. phoTo By NaThaNiEl WooD

$1 pbr $2 blue moon $2 downtown brown

It’s been 10 years since Tom Brosseau, a North Dakotaraised singer-songwriter living in Los Angeles, stepped off a bus that plopped him in the heart by Blake Gillespie of the UC Davis campus. He’d never been to the college town before and never had reason to until he sent his Late Night at Largo record to an enthusiastic KDVS radio deejay named Michael Leahy.

On that day, he navigated his way to the studio, which he remembered as being in the basement of the campus’ student union (the Lower Freeborn Hall building) “like most college radio stations are.”

Leahy, who would later go on to found the Davis-based Crossbill Records, was seated in the booth recording an episode of his Cool As Folk radio show. He invited Brosseau on the air to talk, and after the show, the men became immediate friends.

Now, a visit from Brosseau, who returns on Friday, February 28, for a show at the Veterans Memorial Theatre, means more than just another gig. During recent, separate phone interviews, both shared stories of biking around Davis and crashing grad parties. There was that time, too, that Brosseau posed as a human-behaviorist major who needed photos of grad students in their element.

“It wasn’t about barter or selling tons of records,” says Brosseau. “It was about making contact. Music has so little do with playing music. It’s more about the friendships you make along the way. That’s how we became good friends.”

These wild Davis nights gave Brosseau a friend he could trust, so when his FatCat Records deal went sour and the 37-year-old had no home for his Grass Punks LP, he called Leahy first.

Leahy, who’d just put his chips toward an album by the Louisiana band Brass Bed, said he wanted to release Brosseau’s record, but lacked funds. He suggested his friend shop it around

“ Music has so little do with playing music. It’s more about the friendships you make along the way.”

Tom Brosseau folk singer-songwriter Despite Brosseau’s North Dakota upbringing, Leahy says he heard similarities on Late Night at Largo—specifically, elements of oral tradition—that reminded him of his grandparent’s small-town folklore in Astoria, Ore. Now it’s about bringing Brosseau’s music to a larger audience, he says.

“I want others to appreciate him and hear him, because he’s living and available—[and] for him to not end up like a Nick Drake or a Townes Van Zandt, where we fall in love with these songwriters after they’re gone.” Ω

RESTAURANT ss BAR BAR CLUB ss RESTAURANT COMEDY COMEDY CLUB

Not exactly party music

thu 02/27

Mouthful of diamonds: A group of women walked to the end of the line for Ace of Spades, which by 8:10 p.m. on Friday had already snaked down 14th Street to S Street.

“Who are we seeing? Pentagram?”

That lady was an anomaly. The sold-out show mostly drew mega-fans and Sarah Barthel-devotees sporting jet-black hair, black leather leggings and gold pumps. A group of them stood behind me in line, squealing and squealing about how much they loved Phantogram, how it was the best sex music ever, and how desperately they wished they were wasted.

It kicked off an unfortunate pattern for the evening: really annoying, obnoxious behavior carried out in various annoying, obnoxious ways. There were the pushers and shovers who just had to get to the front. There were the 18 year olds that would respond with demands for personal space, courtesy and respect, which were met with more elbows and a valid question: “Have you ever been to a show before?” There were massive groups of people near the front, standing perfectly still while they recorded shitty videos of every single song on their smartphones.

And, to make matters even worse, there were tall guys.

At least Phantogram was mesmerizing.

The synth-pop duo—Barthel and Josh Carter—are currently on a world tour for their sophomore effort, Voices, and the pair’s excitement was obvious.

“We’ve been waiting to play new songs for you guys for so long,” Barthel said, before launching into “Black Out Days,” a new track featuring chopped-up samples and hip-hop beats.

“Fall in Love,” with its arresting, catchy chorus, has been a popular one on the local airwaves, and, sure enough, it sent the audience into a frenzy. Meanwhile, the band’s very first big hit, “When I’m Small,” stunned immediately with Barthel breathing soft ohs into the mic— a single spotlight, silence and adoration surrounding her.

Granted, Phantogram’s signature airy vocals with swirling guitar and heavy synth isn’t exactly party music.

It’s head-down-and-thrash-and-letyour-body-convulse-a-little music— kind of like how Barthel dances in all her music videos. It’s exactly how she moves onstage, too, and it’s powerful.

The crowd demanded an encore, and Phantogram obliged.

“Thank you so much,” Barthel said. “You are so beautiful.”

Aw, Sarah. We think you’re beautiful, too.

folk // rock // 8pm // $5

BEFORE

|

NEWS

Neo-soulful: With seven members and a fairly elaborate setup, the Seshen took up about half of Fox & Goose’s front room on Saturday night. The Oakland-based outfit includes two vocalists, two drummers, a bassist, a keyboardist and a sampler. Lead singer-songwriter Lalin St. Juste had her own custom pedal board for the vocal mic, and the bongo player utilized a variety of sticks and hand combinations, a small wooden bench and a baking-loaf pan. And not one, not two, but seven cow bells.

The Seshen’s sound can’t be easily described. “Neo-soul, electro-pop” might work. But it’s also dreamlike, cerebral and occasionally juxtaposed against heavy dub beats.

St. Juste’s warm, soulful voice feels like a big hug, complemented by Akasha Orr’s smiling harmonies.

And on this particular evening, the two women were in their own lovely worlds, twirling in circles and dancing saucily between bandmates. I wanted St. Juste’s half-shaven, half-longdreadlocked hair even more than I craved another whiskey.

I’m clearly not the only person quite taken with the Seshen’s potential. Los Angeles public radio station KCRW’s influential, tastemaker deejay Jason Bentley gave the band a few spins this month as it toured through Southern California. The UK-based Tru Thoughts record label signed the group in January, suggesting the band will be playing far bigger venues than the Fox & Goose in the near future. And even patrons at the Fox & Goose—so often chatting and paying more attention to the bar than the musicians—were completely fixated during the entire set. The band’s self-titled, 11-track album is streaming online for free, and downloadable for just $5, at www.theseshen.bandcamp.com.

Study this: I know exactly where I’ll be this weekend, and if you’re into darling indie rock, you’ll want to come along, too. San Francisco-based five-piece Social Studies invades Luigi’s Fun Garden (1050 20th Street) on Saturday, March 1, for a mere $8, along with Sacramento’s Michael RJ Saalman (of Biosexual) and Portland, Oregon, band AAN. Social Studies has played the likes of S.F.’s Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival and South by Southwest, alongside Phoenix, Grizzly Bear and Tune-Yards, and its 2012 Antenna Farm Records release was beloved

by Nylon, Vice and Paste magazines.

Thank me later.

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mac russ & chris ernst

FRIDAY 2/28 - SUNDAY 3/2 FROM COMEDY CENTRAL & DEF COMEDY JAM!

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WEDNESDAY 3/5

SACRAMENTO COMEDY SHOWCASE

fri 02/28

the darling clementines

THURSDAY 3/6 - SUNDAY 3/9 FROM KEVIN HART’S PLASTIC CUP BOYS!

burlesque // 8pm // $12 ($10 adv)

NA’IM LYNN GARY ANDERSON

sat 03/01

the inciters house of orange

FRIDAY 3/14 - SATURDAY 3/15 FROM COMEDY CENTRAL PRESENTS AND VOICE OF SHEEN ESTEVEZ ON JIMMY NEUTRON!

northern soul // 9pm // $8

JEFF GARCIA

sun 03/02

showcase sunday open mic 9-12am // free

WEDNESDAY 3/19

ONE NIGHT ONLY!

RALPHIE MAY

comedy 7-9pm // talent mon 03/03

THURSDAY 3/20 - SUNDAY 3/23 FROM CONAN AND CHELSEA LATELY!

karaoke 8pm // free

BRENT MORIN DAVE THOMASON, NICK ARAGON

tues 03/04

greatest stories ever tol//dfreedead // garcia

THURSDAY 3/27 - SUNDAY 3/30 FROM COMEDY CENTRAL & MTV’S GUY CODE!

dylan revue // 8pm

JULIAN MCCULLOUGH

Wed 03/05

t pub nigh // 4pm // free

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- February 27 -

JELLY BREAD

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THE WILD NEWSPAPER: FEATHERSSAC NEWS & REVIEW

Mar 07 Lovefool Mar 08 ZuhG Mar 09 Con Bro Chill JAMESTOWN Mar 10 Larry and His Flask / Scott H. Biram PUBLISH DATE: REVIVAL 2/27/2014 Mar 11 Dumpstaphunk 7pm • $15adv ART DUE: 2/21 Mar 13 Musical Charis 14 Cayucas CONTENT: PUNCHLINE Mar Mar 14 Doey Rock - March 04 - February 28 SIZE: 1.87” X 5.67” Mar 15 Foreverland Mar 16 Cat Stevens Tribute ART PRODUCTION: SACHA PFEIFERMar(720) 239-3411 PHOX, LINE & CIRCLE 8pm • $15adv 18 Galactic 7pm • $15adv Mar 19 The Sword / Big Business NOTES: Mar 21 Tommy Castro and the Painkillers Mar 22 Sandra Dolores Mar 22 Mustache Harbor Mar 23 Weekend Mar 26 Toubab Krewe / Mark Sexton Band - March 01 KA.MI..KA.ZI 8pm • $7

TYPHOON

DIEGO’S UMBRELLA

ZEPPARELLA

FOLLOW US

- March 06 -

ALL FEMALE LED ZEPPELIN TRIBUTE 8pm • $18adv

EL TEN ELEVEN

HARLOWSNITECLUB HARLOWSNIGHTCLUB

$12adv 6:30pm

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HARLOWSNIGHTCLUB

jan el l eb @ne w s re v i e w . c o m

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28FRI

28FRI

28FRI

01SAT

Motoshi Kosako

The Croissants

Diego’s Umbrella

Dead Western

Blue Line Arts, 6:30 p.m., $20-$24 Motoshi Kosako is primarily a self-taught harpist who trained on piano and guitar.

He held the spot of principal harpist for JAZZ the Stockton Symphony, was the featured soloist for Mozart’s Concerto for Flute, Harp, and Orchestra in C major during the 2009-2010 season, and is a highly respected jazz musician in Japan.

Among his awards is Sacramento Magazine’s Best Jazz Hound in Tie and Tail. Kosako performs solo, and in jazz duos, trios and quartets. Since 2010, he has collaborated with Grammy Award-winning musician Paul McCandless to create a new jazz sound, featuring Kosako’s harp and McCandless’ oboe.

405 Vernon Street, Suite 100 in Roseville; http://harpmusician.com.

—Trina L. Drotar

40 | SN&R |

02.27.14

Luigi’s Fun Garden, 8 p.m., $5 We can certainly hope for flakey, buttery pastries in addition to seeing the Croissants, a local punk outfit that plays extremely loud and extremely fast. (Not sounding familiar?

You may recognize its members from other local bands Charles Albright, Nacho Business and Sneeze Attack.) The party at Luigi’s Fun Garden this week is to celebrate a new 7-inch from the Croissants: We’re in the Basement released on Hella Mad Records. The record’s three songs run less than four-minutes long.

Total. We mentioned they played fast, right?

Also on the bill: local punk PUNK bands Rad, Crude Studs, the Moans and the Strange Party, who is also releasing a new cassette. 1050 20th Street, www.croissants.bandcamp.com.

—Janelle Bitker

Harlow’s Restaurant & Nightclub, 9 p.m., $15-$18 The San Francisco gypsy-rock sextet Diego’s Umbrella has blended punk, ska, flamenco and klezmer sounds for more than a decade. The group’s 2012 release Proper Cowboy, produced by the Rondo Brothers (Galactic, Foster the People), included an GYPSY ROCK updated take on Sonny and Cher’s 1972 hit “A Cowboy’s Work Is Never Done.”

Diego’s Umbrella can electrify crowds in a nightclub or a large festival with its eclectic variety of fiddles, tubas, synthesizers and even a theremin. Note to you youngsters: Sorry, but this Friday-night show happens to be 21-and-over. 2708 J Street, www.diegosumbrella.com.

—Cody Drabble

Shine, 8 p.m., $5 Dead Western is dark folk personified.

Described by his Discorporate Records label as “an old tree singing songs of love and sorrow,” Troy Mighty is the Jack-of-all-trades FOLK musician on vocals, guitar, saxophone and more behind Dead Western’s peculiar and murky orchestra.

Mighty often asks an array of friends to fill in on violin and percussion during albums, but his performances are usually solo, accompanied only by an acoustic guitar and his low voice.

Dead Western’s 10-track album Everything, Eternally, released in 2012, remains his latest body of work. Halfpence and Haypenny from Nevada City and Medicine Moon of Berkeley will also perform this evening. 1400 E Street, www.facebook.com/deadwestern.

—Steph Rodriguez

01SAT

02SUN

04TUES

05WED

Zepparella

Robert Randolph & the Family Band

Ani DiFranco

Ladysmith Black Mambazo

Harlow’s Restaurant & Nightclub, 9 p.m., $18-$20 All-female versions of classic all-male rock bands are a thing in the world of tribute bands. Zepparella, which started in 2004, and pays tribute to the great Led Zeppelin, does a phenomenal job. Part of what makes Zepparella so great is that the drummer, Clementine, started the band and is the driving force behind it. Honestly, it was Led Zeppelin’s drummer John Bonham that most critically defined the band’s sound. His slow, R&B-influenced drunken swagger was a main factor that set the group apart from all CLASSIC ROCK the other ’70s rock bands. Clementine has studied and replicates Bonham’s drum chops, making for a faithful re-enactment to the great, less-than-perfect Led Zeppelin.

2708 J Street, www.zepparella.com.

Crest Theatre, 7:30 p.m., $30-$45 The 2013 album Lickety Split was a delicious return to form for Robert Randolph; 2006’s Colorblind proved to be an underwhelming sophomore effort, and 2010’s We Walk This BLUES Road was such an about-face for Randolph’s band that it was hardly recognizable. But for folks who loved the jamtastic rock ’n’ roll stylings of the group’s 2003 debut Unclassified and it’s epic live shows early in its career, Lickety Split came as a welcome relief. Randolph’s pedal steel guitar skills are on display throughout, making a particular impression on the raucous “Amped Up” and the alternately soulful and hook-filled “New Orleans.” 1013 K Street, www.robertrandolph.net.

LIVE FEB 28

FEB 27 | THURS | 8:00PM | $7 COVER

rock / $5

MARCH 1 | SAT | 8:00PM | $6 COVER

INFERNO OF JOY, DEAD HORSES, SIX BEERS DEEP

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EVERY MONDAY | 8-CLOSE | NO COVER ACOUSTIC/SPOKEN OPEN MIC EVERY WEDNESDAY | 8-10PM | NO COVER NAUGHTY TRIVIA EVERY THURSDAY | 4-7PM | NO COVER HAPPY HOUR BLUES JAM EVERY SUNDAY | 9PM-CLOSE REGGAE NIGHT-FREE BEFORE 10PM

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NEWS

|

$1 tacos, $2 coronas, 2–8pm wednesday

sign-ups at 7:30pm thursday

KaraoKe @ 7:30pm

doors open at 11:30

STOMPER 98, THE OLD FIRM CASUALS, CONTROL, PRESSURE POINT

COLLEGE nIGHt 9:30Pm-1am

taco tues

MARCH 8 | SAT | 9:00PM | $5 COVER

MARCH 9 | SUN | 3:30PM | $10 COVER

taCOS - 2 FOr $2 LIVE trIVIa - 7:30Pm

tuesday

open for lunch & dinner 7 days a weeK

RECORD CLUB PRESENTS: RADIO RADIO 80’S DANCE NIGHT!

party hits from the 80’s, 90’s to today / $5

trivia @ 6:30pm

BBQ FOR JASON HOLTZMAN

W/THE SHOVE-ITS & THE FLIP-OFFS

LOVEFOOL

|

—Chris Parker

—Trina L. Drotar

open mic

MARCH 7 | FRI | 8:00PM | $6 COVER

rock cover Band / $5

The famed South African all-male a capella choir is now celebrating its 50th anniversary. Last month, it won a fourth Grammy Award for an album dedicated to Nelson Mandela, whose friendship sustained each WORLD for a quarter-century. It’s somewhat bittersweet because the latest release, Always With Us, also features the previously recorded vocals of founder Joseph Shabalala’s late wife, who was murdered 12 years ago. Shabalala, who recently announced his retirement, isn’t on the tour, but his grandson is, as the act’s torch is passed across the members’ generations like an heirloom. 1013 K Street, www.mambazo.com.

monday cocktail lounge & concert hall

E VErY FrI & Sat 9 P m

BEFORE

Crest Theatre, 7:30 p.m., $30-$48

Feminist, poet, singer-songwriter, guitarist, painter: Ani DiFranco approaches each song with adventure. She’s a folk singer who’s not afraid to mix it up with punk, jazz, hip-hop or funk, even appearing on Dumpstaphunk’s Dirty Word album. At age 18, and long before it was fashionable, DiFranco circumvented the corporate record companies and created her own label, Righteous Babe Records. The label has allowed her to more fully explore her FOLK creativity through experimentation and collaboration. She received the Woman of Courage Award from the National Organization for Women in 2006, and in 2009, she received the Woody Guthrie Award.

Opening is jazz violinst Jenny Scheinman.

1013 K Street, www.righteousbabe.com.

—Brian Palmer

—Aaron Carnes

EntErtaInmEnt

Crest Theatre, 7:30 p.m., $30-$35

F E AT U R E

STORY

live music feb 28 stellar a tribute to incubus & thunder cover mar 01 humble wolf mar 02 vagabond brothers unplugged 2pm-5pm mar 07 said the shotgun ancient astronaut mar 08 garrett wildgust of (the old screen door) & sean fleming mar 14 down the hatch mar 15 simple creation cd release

facebook.com/bar101roseville 101 main street, roseville • 916-774-0505

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NIGHTBEAT

THURSDAY 2/27

ASSEMBLY MUSIC HALL 1000 K St., (916) 832-4751

List your event!

Post your free online listing (up to 15 months early), and our editors will consider your submission for the printed calendar as well. Print listings are also free, but subject to space limitations. Online, you can include a full description of your event, a photo, and a link to your website. Go to www.newsreview.com/calendar and start posting events. Deadline for print listings is 10 days prior to the issue in which you wish the listing to appear.

SUNDAY 3/2

MONDAY-WEDNESDAY 3/3-3/5

BAEZA, REIGN, STATUS GOES, PLAYAH K; 7pm, $20-$40

WE BUTTER THE BREAD WITH BUTTER, LIONS LIONS; 6pm, $12

SUNNY LEDFURD, MATT GAGE; 7pm W, $13

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; Latin video flair and Wii bowling, 7pm Tu

BAR 101

Karaoke, 7:30pm, no cover

STELLAR tribute to Incubus, 9:30pm, $5

HUMBLE WOLF, 9:30pm, $5

VAGABOND BROTHERS, 2-5pm, no cover

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

BLUE LAMP

1400 Alhambra, (916) 455-3400

DEAD HORSES, INFERNO OF JOY, 6 BEERS DEEP; 8pm, $6

WHISKEY AND STITCHES, THE PIKEYS, ONE-EYED REILLY; 8pm, $7

SMIRKER, GALACTIVORE, M.D.S.O; 9pm, $6

Get Down to the Champion Sound reggae night, 9pm-2am, $3

Acoustic open mic, 8pm M, no cover; Naughty Trivia, 8pm W, no cover

THE BOARDWALK

AG, LUI VEGA, A DON NAMED FRANCA,

THA JACKA, PLAYAH K, LIL ROZY; 8pm, $15-$20

AVENUE OF ESCAPE, STATE LINE EMPIRE, KOREAN FIRE DRILL; 8pm, $10 MARTIN SEXTON, JAY NASH; 7:30pm, $25-$28

FOXTAILS BRIGADE, BEAUTIFUL DUDES; 8pm W, $8-$10

Dragalicious, 9pm, $5

Queer Idol, 9pm M, no cover ; Latin night, 9pm Tu, $5 ; DJ Alazzawi, 9pm W,

2003 K St., (916) 448-8790 101 Main St., Roseville; (916) 774-0505

9426 Greenback Ln., Orangevale; (916) 988-9247 BOBBY Z; 8pm, $10

CENTER FOR THE ARTS

BIRDS OF CHICAGO, 8pm, $18-$22

314 W. Main St., Grass Valley; (530) 274-8384

THE COZMIC CAFÉ

Open-mic, 7:30pm, no cover

DISTRICT 30

Fever with DJ Cuervo and DJ Jayrokk, 10pm, call for cover

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

FACES

2000 K St., (916) 448-7798

FOX & GOOSE

MICHAEL LEWIS MARTINEZ, CHICKEN & DUMPLING; 8pm, no cover

1001 R St., (916) 443-8825

Hey local bands!

SATURDAY 3/1

INCREDIBLE ME, I WISH WE WERE ROBOTS, ALTESSA; 6:30pm, $10

BADLANDS

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.

FRIDAY 2/28

MANY WORLDS, 7pm, $5 DJ dancing with DJ A-One, 10pm, call for cover

Saturday Riot! with DJ Louie Giovanni, 10pm, call for cover

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

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

THE DENVER J BAND, STEVIE NADER, WOLFGANG VEGA; 9pm, $5

MIKE VISSER, EMILY KOLLARS, FOR SAYLE; 9pm, $5

G STREET WUNDERBAR

FAIR STRUGGLE, WHITE MINORITIES; 9pm, no cover

228 G St., Davis; (530) 756-9227

THE GOLDEN BEAR

DJ Shaun Slaughter, 10pm, call for cover

2326 K St., (916) 441-2252

HALFTIME BAR & GRILL

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

HARLOW’S

JELLY BREAD, KAMIKAZE; 9pm, $7

2708 J St., (916) 441-4693

DJ Crook One, 10pm, call for cover

DJ Whores, 10pm, no cover

ROGUE, 9pm, $5

MACH 5, 9pm, $5

DIEGO’S UMBRELLA, 9pm, $15-$18

ZEPPARELLA, 9pm, $18-$20

LEVEL UP FOOD & LOUNGE

Karaoke, 9pm, no cover

LUNA’S CAFÉ & JUICE BAR

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

THIS HIATUS, LUMOHS; 8pm, $5

MARILYN’S ON K

MAC RUSS AND CHRIS ERNST, RUBBIDY BUPPITY, SWAHILI PASSION; 8pm, $5

The Darling Clementines Bohemian Burlesque Review, 8pm, $10-$12

2431 J St., (916) 448-8768

1414 16th St., (916) 441-3931 908 K St., (916) 446-4361

Open-mic, 7:30pm M, no cover; Pub Quiz, 7pm Tu, no cover

MIDTOWN BARFLY

Industry Night, 9pm, call for cover

Trivia night, W, call for cover Trivia night, 7:30-9pm Tu, no cover

JAMESTOWN REVIVAL, WILD FEATHERS; 9pm, $15-$17

TYPHOON, PHOX, LINE AND CIRCLE, 8pm Tu, $15-$18 Hip-hop and R&B deejay dancing, 9:16pm Tu, no cover Nebraska Mondays, 7:30pm M, $5-$20; Comedy night, 8pm W, $6

THE INCITERS, HOUSE OF ORANGE; 9pm, $8

Karaoke, 9pm M, no cover; Greatest Stories Ever Told, 8pm Tu, no cover

Get Down to the Champion Sound, reggae and dancehall deejays, 10pm, $5

1119 21st St., (916) 549-2779

1000 K Street, Sacramento, CA 95814

foR ticKets to all sHoWs visit assemblyMusicHall.com

For Rentals or Private Parties please contact AssemblyMusicHall@gmail.com

sat march 1 @ 7pm fri feb 28 @ 6:30pm

baeza

reign - statusgoes - playah k

sun march 2 @ 6pm

wed march 5 @ 7pm

lions lions - honour crest - the illiad and the odyssey

with special guest matt w. gage

Upcoming ShowS

sun march 9 @ 2pm

sat march 8 @ 7:30pm maxxx

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o.n.l.y. dance festival original.new.legit.you.

2v2 bboy battle & 5v5 all dance style (finals)

tue march 11 @ 6:30pm

mar 06 mar 13 mar 14 mar 15 mar 17 mar 21 mar 22 mar 23 mar 24 mar 25 mar 26 mar 27 mar 29 apr 04 apr 05 apr 06 apr 08 apr 09 apr 11

posterchild infected mushroom rachel barton pine the siren show protest the hero the Kin Kumande’s live experience alesana being as an ocean blacK lips carnifex animals as leaders autumn sKy / life in 24 frames barcelona headbang for the hwy cunninlynguists zz ward bear hands bombay bicycle club

NAKED LOUNGE DOWNTOWN 1111 H St., (916) 443-1927

THURSDAY 2/27

FRIDAY 2/28

JIM RAINES, JIM FUNK; 8pm, $5

EVAN BAILEY, ELI JENKINS; 8:30pm, $5

Jazz session, 8pm M, no cover

WILLIAM MYLAR, 5pm, no cover; 6 BEERS DEEP, THE WEST 7’S; 9pm, $5

Karaoke, 9pm Tu, no cover; Open-mic, 9pm W, no cover

OLD IRONSIDES

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

SATURDAY 3/1

ON THE Y

670 Fulton Ave., (916) 487-3731

Karaoke, 9pm, no cover

ARTEMIS GONE, STEEL SAVIOR, ORIGIN ALIVE, SP!NE; 9pm, $6

THE PALMS PLAYHOUSE

MARCIA BALL, 8pm, $25

JANIVA MAGNESS, 8:30pm, $20

13 Main St., Winters; (530) 795-1825

SUNDAY 3/2

MONDAY-WEDNESDAY 3/3-3/5

Karaoke, 9pm, no cover

Open-mic comedy, 9pm, no cover

Karaoke, 9pm Tu, no cover

THE PARK ULTRA LOUNGE

Mardi Gras with DJ Peeti V, 9pm, $15

Mardi Gras with DJ Peeti V, 9pm, $15

Asylum Downtown: Gothic, industrial, EBM dancing, 9pm, call for cover

PINE COVE TAVERN

Sacramento Beer Week Pint Nights, 7-10pm, no cover

Sacramento Beer Week Pint Nights, 7-10pm, no cover

Sacramento Beer Week Pint Nights, 7-10pm, no cover

Battle of the Musicians, 9:30pm-1am Tu, no cover

Country Karaoke, 9pm M; Rock On! live-band karaoke, 8pm Tu, no cover

1116 15th St., (916) 442-7222

502 29th St., (916) 446-3624

PJ’S ROADHOUSE

5461 Mother Lode, Placerville; (530) 626-0336

DJ Old Griff, 9pm, no cover

ICE HOUSE BLUES, 9pm, $5

POWERHOUSE PUB

CHRIS GARDNER, 10pm, call for cover

AUTO REPLAY, 10pm, call for cover

SAINT SOLITAIRE, THE DENVER J BAND, ELEMENT OF SOUL; 10pm, call for cover

JIMI JAMES, 3pm, call for cover

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

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

Sunday Night Soul Party, 9pm, $5

614 Sutter St., Folsom; (916) 355-8586

THE PRESS CLUB

2030 P St., (916) 444-7914

SHADY LADY SALOON

EMILY KOLLARS, 9pm, no cover

1409 R St., (916) 231-9121

GOLDEN CADILLACS, 9pm, no cover

SOL COLLECTIVE

SIKH KNOWLEDGE, MANDEEP SETHI, EL INDIO, WISECHILD; 8pm, $10

2574 21st St., (916) 832-0916

STONEY INN/ROCKIN’ RODEO

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

1320 Del Paso Blvd., (916) 927-6023

THE STATION

Salsa with Mike Del Campo, 8:30pm, no cover; $5 after 9:30pm

TORCH CLUB

X TRIO, 5pm, no cover; QUINN HEDGES BAND, 9pm, $5

1100 Orlando Ave., Roseville; (916) 728-1166 904 15th St., (916) 443-2797

Birds of Chicago 8pm Saturday, $18-$22.

Center for the Arts Americana soul

PAILER AND FRATIS, 5:30-7:30pm, no cover; STEVEN ROTH, 9pm, $7

Microphone Mondays, 6pm M, $1-$2; Liberation Permaculture, 6pm Tu

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

Country dance party, 8pm, no cover

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

Salsa with Mike Del Campo, 8:30pm, no cover, $5 after 9:30pm

Domingos Latinos with Mr. DJ Omar, 9pm, $5-$10

Blues jam session, 8:30pm Tu, no cover

JOHNNY KNOX, 5:30pm, no cover; OLD SCREEN DOOR, 9pm, $8

Blues jam, 4pm, no cover; THE NIBBLERS, 8pm, $7

ELEMENT BRASS BAND, LEW FRATIS AND FRIENDS, Tu, $5

Mandeep Sethi with Sikh Knowledge, El Indio and Wisechild 8pm Saturday, $10.

Sol Collective Hip-hop

All ages, all the time ACE OF SPADES

J BOOG, LOS RAKAS, SIMPLE CREATION; 6:30pm, $20

1417 R St., (916) 448-3300

LUIGI’S SLICE AND FUN GARDEN

THE CROISSANTS, THE STRANGE PARTY, RAD!; call for time and cover

1050 20th St., (916) 552-0317

SHINE

DR. ROCK & THE STUFF, JOHNNY GUITAR KNOX; 8pm, $5

1400 E St., (916) 551-1400

TIERRA, INNER SOUL, 7pm, $20

SOUL SHINE, TAO JIRIKI, ELECTRIC SNORKEL; 8pm, $5

DEAD WESTERN, HALFPENCE AND HAYPENNY, MEDICINE MOON, 8pm

Open jazz jam w/ Jason Galbraith & Friends, 8pm Tu, no cover

Ari Shaffir

March 7th

Ticket s

Doors: 77pm • Sh Show: 8pm Tickets available at colusacasino.com/entertainment.

Free Play

At the D

With S Special i lG Guest stt

oor

Big Jay Oakerson

Must be 21 to Attend. Management Reserves All Rights ©2014.

3770 Hwy 45 • Colusa, CA • 530.458.8844 • www.colusacasino.com BEFORE

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WHAT’S ON YOUR

HORIZON?

NOW OFFERING PLANTS! Join Horizon Non-Profit today for safe access to a wide variety of high quality medical cannabis.

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SN&R | 02.27.14

HORIZON NON-PROFIT COLLECTIVE 3600 Power Inn Rd Suite 1A Sacramento, CA 95826 916.455.1931

Bring in any competitor’s coupon and we’ll beat it by $5

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Must present competitor’s ad. Some restrictions apply.

Will California’s anti-smoking laws impede the opportunity for business growth after legalization? My question stems from the idea that there could be Dutch-style coffee shops and smoking lounges, or some such other California incarnation of a social establishment catering to patrons of the green. What are the known legal obstacles for would-be proprietors of a business where marijuana is (openly) consumed on-site?

—The Bulldog M LU A Using deduction, I surmise that you (or perhaps E B

by NGAIO a “friend” of yours) are interested in opening an Amsterdam-style cannabis club. I applaud your sentiments. I myself would love to visit. ’13 As to the legalities of such an establishment, a sk420 @ ne wsreview.c om only time will tell. First, we have to legalize pot.

Then, we open a coffee shop.

When the first cannabis clubs started appearing in California, they were definitely on the “social club” model. Members could come in, buy cannabis and consume on-site. I think scientists sometimes overlook the social benefits of marijuana. These clubs allowed many people, some of whom are very ill and cut off from families and other support, to find help and fellowship at cannabis clubs. than a few clubs, When the first likeMore Berkeley Patients cannabis clubs Group and Dennis Peron’s Cannabis Buyers Club started appearing (three floors in the heart of San Francisco) in California, they downtown would offer patient services were definitely on the and counseling, massage, cooking lessons and all “social club” model. kinds of stuff. When medical-marijuana clubs started to spread toward Los Angeles, they were mostly in the form of retail-only clubs. Some still offered patients services, but nothing like the scale of the NorCal clubs.

During the crackdowns of 2011, virtually every club in California that remained open became a retail-only spot. Most of the cities that regulate medical-cannabis dispensaries have some sort of “no consumption of any kind shall be permitted on the premises” type of deal written into the law.

The biggest obstacle is the specter of drugged driving. Prohibitionists love to argue about the “millions of drivers stoned out of their minds” the legalization would create. They conveniently ignore the studies that show states with medical-marijuana laws to have lower rates of traffic fatalities than other states.

Ngaio Bealum There’s also this thing called a “dram shop law,” is a Sacramento which holds bar owners (and homeowners and party comedian, activist throwers) responsible for damages caused by people and marijuana expert. that leave their establishment impaired. Since it is often Email him questions hard to tell how stoned someone is, or how hard that at ask420@ newsreview.com. weed-infused edible is gonna affect them, you could be exposing yourself (snicker) to a lawsuit.

You may want to think about opening a private club.

Everyone has to pay a small fee to be a member, and within the club, members are free to enjoy their weed of choice. Since the club isn’t open to the public, you may find more leeway. Good luck. Ω

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www.Sac420Doc.com BEFORE

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STORY

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4020 Durock Rd, Ste 1 • Shingle Springs, CA • (916) 757–0980 open monDAy – fRiDAy 11Am–8pm, SAtuRDAy 11Am–7pm, SunDAy 11Am–6pm 46

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BEFORE

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STORY

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daily spECials monday

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Norwood

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Main Ave

NEWS

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FEATURE

safe capitol compassion 135 Main avenue • sacramento ca, 95838 Open Mon thru sat 10aM–7PM // sun 12–5PM 916-254-3287 STORY

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top shelf

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NEW YORK MASSAGE

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ARIES (March 21-April 19): The battles

you’ve been waging these last 10 months have been worthy of you. They’ve tested your mettle and grown your courage.

But I suspect that your relationship with these battles is due for a shift. In the future they may not serve you as well as they have up until now. At the very least, you will need to alter your strategy and tactics. It’s also possible that now is the time to leave them behind entirely—to graduate from them and search for a new cause that will activate the next phase of your evolution as an enlightened warrior.

What do you think?

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): “Life is like Sanskrit read to a pony,” said Lou Reed.

That might be an accurate assessment for most people much of the time, but I don’t think it will be true for you in the coming days. On the contrary: You will have a special capacity to make contact and establish connection. You’ve heard of dog whisperers and ghost whisperers?

You will be like an all-purpose, jack-ofall-trades whisperer—able to commune and communicate with nervous creatures and alien life-forms and pretty much everything else. If anyone can get a pony to understand Sanskrit, it will be you.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Does Kim

Kardashian tweak and groom her baby daughter’s eyebrows? They look pretty amazing, after all—elegant, neat, perfectly shaped. What do you think, Gemini? Ha! I was just messing with you. I was checking to see if you’re susceptible to getting distracted by meaningless fluff like celebrity kids’ grooming habits. The cosmic truth of the matter is that you should be laserfocused on the epic possibilities that your destiny is bringing to your attention. It’s time to reframe your life story. How? Here’s my suggestion: See yourself as being on a mythic quest to discover and fully express your soul’s code. century American folk hero known as Wild Bill Hickok was born James Butler Hickok.

At various times in his life, he was a scout for the Union Army, a lawman for violent frontier towns, a professional gambler and a performer in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Women found him charismatic, and he once killed an attacking bear with a knife. He had a brother Lorenzo who came to be known as Tame Bill Hickok.

In contrast to Wild Bill, Tame Bill was quiet, gentle and cautious. He lived an uneventful life as a wagon master, and children loved him. Right now, Cancerian, I’m meditating on how I’d like to see your inner Wild Bill come out to play for a while, even as your inner Tame Bill takes some time off.

type of person who wears gloves when you throw snowballs, Germans would call you Handschuhschneeballwerfer.

They use the same word as slang to mean “coward.” I’m hoping that in the coming days you won’t display any behavior that would justify you being called Handschuhschneeballwerfer. You need to bring a raw, direct, straightforward attitude to everything you do. You shouldn’t rely on any buffers, surrogates or intermediaries.

Metaphorically speaking, make sure that nothing comes between your bare hands and the pure snow.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): In his song

“4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” Bruce Springsteen mentions a disappointing development. “[T]hat waitress I was seeing lost her desire for me,” he sings. “[S]he said she won’t set herself on fire for me anymore.” I’m assuming nothing like that has happened to you recently, Scorpio. Just the opposite: I bet there are attractive creatures out there who would set themselves on fire for you. If for some reason this isn’t true, fix the problem! You have a cosmic mandate to be incomparably irresistible.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21):

“Some people say home is where you come from,” says a character in Katie Kacvinsky’s novel Awaken. “But I think it’s a place you need to find, like it’s scattered and you pick pieces of it up along the way.” That’s an idea I invite you to act on in the coming weeks, Sagittarius. It will be an excellent time to discover more about where you belong and who you belong with. And the best way to do that is to be aggressive as you search far and wide for clues, even in seemingly unlikely places that maybe you would never guess contain scraps of home.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19):

What words bring the most points in the game of Scrabble? Expert Christopher Swenson says that among the top scorers are “piezoelectrical” and “ubiquitarianism”—assuming favorable placements on the board that bring double-letter and triple-word scores. The first word can potentially net 1,107 points, and the second 1,053. There are metaphorical clues here, Capricorn, for how you might achieve maximum success in the next phase of the game of life. You should be well-informed about the rules, including their unusual corollaries and loopholes. Be ready to call on expert help and specialized knowledge.

Assume that your luck will be greatest if you are willing to plan nonstandard gambits and try bold tricks.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Sorry

to report that you won’t win the lottery this week. It’s also unlikely that you will score an unrecognized Rembrandt painting for a few dollars at a thrift store or discover that you have inherited a chinchilla farm in Peru or stumble upon a stash of gold coins half-buried in the woods. On the other hand, you may get provocative clues about how you could increase your cash flow. To ensure you will notice those clues when they arrive, drop your expectations about where they might come from.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): “If I was a love

poet,” writes Rudy Francisco, addressing a lover, “I’d write about how you have the audacity to be beautiful even on days when everything around you is ugly.” I suspect you have that kind of audacity right now, Leo. In fact, I bet the ugliness you encounter will actually incite you to amplify the gorgeous charisma you’re radiating. The sheer volume of lyrical soulfulness that pours out of you will have so much healing power that you may even make the ugly stuff less ugly. I’m betting that you will lift up everything you touch, nudging it in the direction of grace and elegance and charm.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Avery, a

character in Anne Michaels’ novel The Winter Vault, has a unique way of seeing. When he arrives in a place for the first time, he makes “room for it in his heart.” He “let himself be altered” by it.

At one point in the story, he visits an old Nubian city in Egypt and is overwhelmed by its exotic beauty. Its brightly colored houses are each like “a shout of joy,” like “gardens sprung up in the sand after a rainfall.” After drinking in the sights, he marvels, “It will take all my life … to learn what I have seen today.” Everything I just described is akin to experiences you could have in the coming weeks, Pisces. Can you make room in your heart for the dazzle?

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): “You miss

100 percent of the shots you don’t take,” says hockey great Wayne Gretzky. In other words, you shouldn’t be timid about shooting the puck toward the goal.

Don’t worry about whether you have enough skill or confidence or luck. Just take the damn shot. You’ll never score if you don’t shoot. Or so the theory goes.

But an event in a recent pro hockey game showed there’s an exception to the rule. A New York player named Chris Kreider was guiding the puck with his stick as he skated toward the Minnesota team’s goalie. But when Kreider cocked and swung his stick, he missed the puck entirely. He whiffed. And yet the puck kept sliding slowly along all by itself. It somehow flummoxed the goalie, sneaking past him right into the net. Goal! New rule: You miss only 99.9 percent of the shots you don’t take. I believe you will soon benefit from this loophole, Virgo.

BEFORE

|

NEWS

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LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): If you are the

CANCER (June 21-July 22): The 19th-

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F E AT U R E

PHOTO BY ADAM DILLON

by ROb

For the week of February 27, 2014

STORY

Words with friends Corinne Litchfield is the founder and editor-in-chief of Paper Bag Writers, an online literary journal focused on curating and sharing stories, poems and essays written on brown paper lunch bags. Litchfield also works as a social-media manager for local authors, showing them the ropes of establishing an online presence and promoting new books. She’s also hard at work finishing up her first novel and a collection of interlinked short stories set in her native Maryland. Litchfield stopped writing long enough to talk about literary inspirations, tweeting Margaret Atwood, and why she’s calling out her fellow Sacramento writer and pal Jodi Angel.

Where did the idea come from?

It was influenced by the series of letters that my mother and I exchanged on airsickness bags since I was in my late teens. When she passed away in October 2009, that first flight where I could see the edges of the airsickness bag sticking out from the seat pocket in front of me was incredibly difficult. I started giving myself a writing prompt from the in-flight magazine, spending five minutes before the plane took off to write a piece of short fiction or an essay on the airsickness bag. When I told my writer friends what I was doing and showed some of what I’d written with them, they loved the idea.

What were some of those first writing prompts?

The first one that I remember was “Quick, think Omaha,” from a Southwest [Airlines] in-flight magazine. I just randomly flipped to a page with that ad. That story is on paperbagwriters.net.

soap operas because there was only one Ken, which can cause drama for the Barbies. I still have all the creative writing I did in sixth grade; I put those into a scrapbook. A number of those poems and stories I wrote went into a collection my school put out. That would have been the first affirmation that I’m writing and it’s good. In those first years, I knew it was something I would keep doing.

Pick any writer, living or dead, to contribute to PBW.

[Writers] pay a small fee, between $7 and $10, and they will get in the mail a blank paper bag with a writing prompt tucked inside, which they can use or not, and a selfaddressed stamped envelope. They write their story or poem on it and mail it back to us. Then we scan and publish it on the site with a short [author] bio, and promote it through Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

I think one would definitely be Raymond Carver, because his stories are so amazing and really capture the human condition in all its forms. I imagine he would put together a story that hit home really quickly and involves alcohol in some form or another. As for someone living, Jodi Angel is a friend and local writer. She writes short fiction that just alters me, and I would love to see what she could do with 500 words. She’s so beloved in the Sacramento literary community, and I’m looking forward to her getting the exposure she deserves. Jodi actually owes me a bag, so maybe calling her out in SN&R will get her to send it in!

What kind of writer was your mother?

What’s in PBW’s future?

How does Paper Bag Writers work?

She was a very stream-of-conscious type of writer. She wouldn’t always be very linear in her writing, so you had to know her pretty well to understand some of the things she would say.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

I’ve been writing since I was small, like plays for my Barbie dolls that became |

A RT S & C U LT U R E

I would like to find a business partner who can help with financing and funding so that I can handle the creative and marketing end of things. We’re getting recognition on a regional level, which is fabulous, and I’d like to see that go national. I’d also like to do a charity drive with bags from famous authors and poets that we auction to support a charity my mother would support, like Doctors Without Borders or Heifer International. |

AFTER

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What do you do when you’re not running Paper Bag Writers?

I’m doing social-media management, working with a lot of local authors, helping set up their websites, teaching them how to set up a Facebook page or use Twitter and other tools.

Social media dos and don’ts?

Don’t feel obligated to post every day.

Make it count. Don’t make every post about you. Do share stories and videos and links that mean something to you and matter to you. People want to know who you are, what your values are, and what interests you.

How do I compose the ideal tweet?

Focus on the key message. A tweet is a call to action—you want people to click through the link to your blog or podcast.

Think about what words might motivate people to click through.

Any social-media victories?

When Jan Haag wrote her poem “Ode to a Paper Bag,” I knew the Margaret Atwood poem “A Paper Bag” and I realized I had a great opportunity to promote the site. So I wrote a tweet that name-checked Anne Lamott and Margaret Atwood, and Atwood retweeted me. When I saw, I screamed so loud, everyone in Sacramento probably heard me. Ω

Paper Bag Writers will accept new submissions in March. Visit www.paperbagwriters.net for more information.

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