At Last
Nearly a year after being shot by her fiance, singer Courtney Weaver is finally emerging from the dark
Cover Story
At Last
The musicians jittered and swayed, trapped in the shimmering globe of red and yellow light on the stage: hands manipulating horn, guitar, drums, bass; Soul Revue lead singer Madi Simmons shouting out a deep-kneed funky get-down. Beyond the bright stage the inky dark seemed boundless, a continuous night spreading from the invisible black walls of…
CR Not Involved in New Negotiations for Jefferson School Site
Mike Newman — the “new man” on the Eureka City Council (one of four new members, actually) — stirred up some shit at his first council meeting, on Dec. 7, when he announced that he wasn’t comfortable with the scheduled purchase of the abandoned Jefferson Elementary School site. The campus has been in escrow since September,…
Solutions: John Matthews and Jen Savage Solve Your Problems!
Romantic entanglements? Financial woes? Weird fungus behind your knees? Roommate from hell? Children making you crazy? Bloodstains on the couch? Friends treating you badly? Or maybe you have no friends? Well, now you do! No matter what your problem, big or small, your new best friends John Matthews and Jen Savage (you know us from…
Local Music On Hold
In this age of computerized phone systems, we all spend more time than we’d like on hold, usually listening to bad music. When the Journal moved into our new offices over the summer we got a new digital phone system complete with some of the worst hold music ever — renditions of old Elvis tunes…
Gold Sellers Beware!
A full-page ad in this week’s Journal (page 4) calls one and all down to the Best Western Bayshore Inn, so that the good folks at Ohio Valley Gold and Silver Refinery, in town for one week only, might offer fine prices for your precious metal collectibles. They’ll be there Tuesday through Saturday, the ad…
Fortuna’s Ken Zanzi Appointed To Coastal Commission
A press release from the office of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, reproduced here, announces that the outgoing governor has appointed the Fortuna Mayor Pro-Tem to fill Bonnie Neely’s former seat on the California Coastal Commission.
Rescue at Redwood Creek
Video here. MCKINLEYVILLE, Calif. – Dodging power lines, a Coast Guard a helicopter airlifted a man stranded on a small island in Redwood Creek near Orick last night. The 45-year-old boater made it to the island after his boat capsized while gathering redwood logs in the creek. He yelled for help after making it to…
Mars, One-Way
After decades of popular-press articles, a serious proposal to start the colonization of Mars with one-way missions has been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. In a recent issue of the Journal of Cosmology (journalofcosmology.com/Mars108.html), physicist Paul Davies (Arizona State) and geologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch (Washington State) make a strong case for sending two two-person teams…
Take It From the Top
The Humboldt County Library Eureka branch “Based on the Book” film series for January foregoes screenplays based on novels for a different sort of “book.” Take it From the Top: Classic Movie Musicals spans almost four decades, from the frothy 1935 Top Hat to the darker Cabaret released in 1972. The series runs in chronological…
No Seacrest Needed
This year, they’re makin’ it easy fer ya. Take a glance at the Journal’s calendar and/or music grid this week and you’ll note no shortage of goings-ons to help you celebrate the arbitrary change of calendar numbers someone at some point decided to call “years.” Take your pick. Whether you bro down at the Red…
The Dude > The Duke
Previews Sorry, no new movies this weekend. As noted by Coming Attractions: “There are no changes this week, except that Mill Creek opens Gulliver’s Travels on Wednesday.” (It’s already at the Broadway and also opens Wednesday at the Fortuna in 3-D.) Charlie returns from a deserved holiday vacation this week and promises a review of…
Out with the Old
Another year is crawling to a close, and with it the first decade in the 21st century. Not exactly a great year and certainly not such a great decade. Regardless, it’s time to ring out the old and ring in the new. Since New Year’s Eve falls on a Friday, giving us Saturday and Sunday…
December Again
Time to sit by fires again …
Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia
A book and especially a fictionalized feature film on the founding of Facebook got a lot of buzz recently, predictably because for all its innovation and surprising success, it’s all just the same old story of the fight for love and glory and money. The Internet is increasingly an advertising medium, clotted and cratered with…
Crab and Bubbly Etc.
Our first December living in Trinidad my brand new husband, Scot, fished for Captain Zach, while back on land I worked at Zach’s Crab Shack. There I was introduced to the California tradition of feasting on crab over the Christmas holidays. From early morning on Christmas Eve Day, folks cued up outside the crab house…
Non-Bland Ambition
Theatre isn’t easy anywhere. But it’s particularly hard here, for both participants and audiences. Is there a well-equipped facility with comfortable seats and good sightlines, let alone adequate ventilation and amenities, on the North Coast? North Coast Rep is raising money to replace lighting equipment that is so old that parts aren’t made for it…
Jan. 1-15, 2011
Jan. 1. Southerners know that it is vitally important to eat black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day or risk a year of bad luck. We know of one man, married to a southern woman, who detests the peas and swallows one each year, like a pill, to appease his wife. Black-eyed pea fritters, made in…
epic
Sharon Van Etten is precocious for a singer/songwriter with only an EP and one full-length (Because I Was in Love, 2009). Now Brooklyn-based, Van Etten bounced back and forth between Tennessee and New Jersey soaking up a wide array of musical influences, from Neko Case to Bobbie Gentry to Nico, and created her own distinctive…
Jerry Brown’s Karma
I asked my friend Angela Oh, defense attorney and Buddhist priest, what she thought of the karma of Jerry Brown. Pausing only for a moment, she replied that “his karma is to inherit the collapse of so many institutions his father built.” Infrastructure decay. Traffic congestion and pollution. Water shortages. More prison inmates than state…
