on the cover / By North Coast Journal Staff

Best Of Humboldt 2010 — Staff Picks

Though he depicts a world that the city’s boosters might look at askance, Jesse Wiedel depicts the down-and-out precincts of Eureka honestly, if satirically. He’s influenced equally by the landscapes of the Salton Sea, country music iconography, sword-and-sandal epics and broken-down neon motel signs. The flavor of his work is aptly expressed in the titles of some of his solo exhibitions: Haunted Trailer Park, The Unbearable Ugliness of Being, and God is Dead. The characters in his art are full of violence, pain, fear and desperation, though a surreal gallows humor is never far away. His technique is the visual analogue to the music of The Ramones: what on first glance seems the expression of a simple trash aesthetic ultimately transcends its subject matter through imaginative intensity. Like some post-punk Brueghel, he prefers to view the world through the eyes of society’s lower orders, and though his befuddled peasantry have some very serious problems, they do seem to have more character than the superficially normal people who surround them.

— Jay Herzog

Best Arts Night Noisemaker

What a perfect Saturday night in Old Town! The street lamps are lit. The sidewalks are packed. And the arts, if you will, are alive!

Music permeates. “Oh, that’s nice,” you think to yourself, “a guy playing old standards on accordion. This feels like Paris!” But as you got closer, the melody strikes you. “Wait … is he playing … The Pixies’ ‘Here Comes Your Man’?” Let me confirm. He is.

If you’re a regular attender of either Arts Alive or Arts Arcata, odds are you have paused to take in the novelty of Rick Fugate. Once a month, you can usually find him busking in front of The Linen Closet, just a man and his accordion. But what makes Rick unique, other than being the owner of Humboldt’s most intimidating handlebar mustache, is his song catalog. Whether it’s a Cheap Trick sing-a-long, deep cuts off Pink Floyd’s The Wall, or the theme song to Reading Rainbow, the man has a tune for every occasion.

A drummer by trade, Fugate picked up music theory in high school jazz band, around the same time he picked up the accordion. “My parents exposed me to an unhealthy size dose of ‘Weird’ Al Yankovic.” And the rest is history.

So hey, Arts Alive is this Saturday. When you see Rick, throw a couple bucks in his accordion case. Dude has five kids, with one on the way. Every little bit helps.

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