KELSEYVILLE, Calif. – The last event of the Summer Poetry Series is this Wednesday, Aug. 26, at 6 p.m. at the Saw Shop Gallery Bistro, 3825 Main St. in Kelseyville.
Hosted by Lake County Poet Laureate Casey Carney, the reading features poets KC Patrick, Fran Ransley and Sandy Stillwell, with a collaborative performance by poet Sam Flot and saxophonist Jim Leonardis.
Open mic sign-ups are at 6 p.m.
Five poets will be invited to share up to five minutes of poetry each.
The $10 admission includes a glass of wine, an appetizer and $20 in Saw Shop bucks, to be redeemed at the patron’s convenience.
The sixties, which to this day generates feelings of nostalgia for what many view as the coolest decade, enjoyed a long run of spy capers that might have been, in certain ways, the antidote to anxiety about the tensions underlying the height of the Cold War.
Early in the decade, James Bond, the suave, cool superspy, made his debut with “Dr. No,” quickly followed by “From Russia with Love,” “Goldfinger,” and an endless stream of 007 adventures.
Less serious efforts mimicked the Bond popularity, with James Coburn as master spy Derek Flint and Dean Martin as secret agent Matt Helm.
Like James Bond, both Flint and Helm, exuding sixties cool, were popular with the ladies.
The spy business was not confined just to the big screen.
Of course, there was the hugely popular 1960s television series “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,” starring Robert Vaughn and David McCallum, which has now been adapted by director Guy Ritchie for a fresh take on the stylish spy genre.
Set in 1963 at the height of the Cold War, Ritchie’s “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,” developed as an origin story, centers on the seminal yet reluctant alliance of two agents on both sides of the Iron Curtain given the mission to stop a mysterious international criminal organization.
Henry Cavill’s debonair CIA agent Napoleon Solo, dressed in a natty suit, is first seen crossing Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin.
His mission is to extract the daughter of a vanished German scientist, who is the key to infiltrating the criminal organization.
Armie Hammer’s rough-edged KGB agent Illya Kuryakin, a volatile yet loyal soldier for communist Russia, has also been sent to East Berlin to snatch the same vital German asset.
When Solo and Kuryakin first meet, they are trying to kill each other.
Meanwhile, in an exciting, breakneck, winner-take-all street chase, Solo makes his way to the free world with Gaby Teller (Alicia Vikander), a whip-smart East German auto mechanic who is the estranged daughter of Dr. Udo Teller, once Hitler’s favorite rocket scientist.
The German scientist has gone missing, presumably now in the clutches of the secretive criminal cabal, which happens to be organized by neo-fascist Italian heiress Victoria Vinciguerra (Elizabeth Debicki), an attractive ice queen who looks like a model in Vogue magazine.
Given the high stakes of dealing with a rogue terrorist group with Nazi ties, the Soviet and American agents are forced by their handlers to work together to find the missing scientist and avert nuclear disaster.
Sworn rivals, Solo and Kuryakin vent their national and professional antagonism in a bare-knuckled, bust-up-the-furniture fight designed to convey in no uncertain terms that they might be stuck with each other, but they don’t have to like it.
What results from lingering hostility is a strange sort of buddy movie, with Solo as the suave and often self-serving agent (we learn that he was an art thief after World War II, then given a job in the CIA rather than jail time).
Solo’s background sounds very much like the premise for Robert Wagner’s thief-cum-agent Alexander Mundy in the late Sixties TV series “It Takes a Thief.” Both Solo and Mundy are the sophisticated playboy types.
For his part, the petulant Kuryakin, faithful foot soldier for his authoritarian homeland, deals awkwardly with his newfound role of cooperative spy, and yet he manages to pretend to be an architect engaged to Gaby as a cover when they arrive in Italy.
Using his playboy charm and skills as a thief, Solo gets close to the villainous Victoria, finagling his way into her exclusive party held during an auto race where her husband (Italian actor Luca Calvani) spends his time mostly on the track.
In the hands of Guy Ritchie “The Man from U.N C.L.E.” proves to be an interesting and entertaining summer action film.
As a director, Ritchie has an interesting career, starting with great crime films “Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels” and “Snatch.”
More recently, Ritchie directed the acclaimed blockbusters “Sherlock Holmes” and “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.”
However, he is not immune to bad judgment; while married to Madonna, he co-wrote and directed the execrable “Swept Away” for this then-spouse.
Fortunately, the director knows how to stage impressive set pieces and thrilling action sequences where the stunts are remarkably striking in their execution. “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” has plenty enough of both.
The best of “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” involves many moving parts, from the chemistry that develops with the trio of Gaby, Solo and Kuryakin to the sometimes playful, lighthearted tone where humor is an important ingredient.
The film is also visually dazzling, where the setting of 1963 appears so authentic that the scenic locations in “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” are indistinguishable from the style of the predecessor movies and TV shows that were actually filmed during the sixties.
Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.
Why? That’s the immediate question which comes to mind about the unnecessary reboot of “Fantastic Four,” starring four relative unknowns (except, perhaps, for Miles Teller) in the origin story of how the Marvel Comics superheroes came to possess their unique talents.
This “Fantastic Four,” as opposed, I think, to the two previous installments, spends more time delving into the childhood of Reed Richards, the whiz kid who exerts himself to building a teleportation machine for intergalactic travel, enlisting the help of his classmate Ben Grimm.
The young inventor Reed designs a unique matter transportation device that is cleverly cobbled together from parts scavenged from the salvage yard operated by Ben’s family.
Trial and error of endless experimentation often results in knocking out the power grid throughout the Oyster Bay, Long Island community. But the seventh grade scientist, a complete techno geek, is persistent in his belief that he can finesse his invention.
Years later, at the high school science fair, Miles Teller’s Reed Richards, assisted by Jamie Bell’s Ben Grimm, still fails to impress his dubious science teacher, but gains notice from Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg E. Cathey), dean of the Baxter Institute, a school and think tank.
Dr. Storm invites the young visionary to be a part of his elite group of brilliant students at Baxter Institute, an educational center dedicated to incubating the best new ideas from high school and college students.
Fortunately, the dean of the Baxter Institute spots gifted potential where lesser beings only see Reed’s prototype experiments to be nothing more than a menace to school property and society in general.
Boarding at the Manhattan-based research center, Reed becomes acquainted with Dr. Storm’s children. Sue Storm (Kate Mara), the adopted daughter, is a brilliant scientist and mathematician, and she figures prominently in the quartet of superheroes.
Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan) is first seen street racing in his fast car, looking like he may be auditioning for a role in the next “Fast and Furious” film. Like Vin Diesel and his cohorts, Johnny is a rebel who chafes under authority and the strict discipline of his father.
The Baxter program allows Reed to develop a space shuttle that runs on the breakthrough technology he first pioneered in his parents’ garage. Success is achieved when the shuttle transports a monkey to Planet Zero and back without evidence of any ill effects.
One night, Reed decides to test his device on human beings, so he enlists his pal Ben and Dr. Storm’s son Johnny. Also joining the expedition is fellow Baxter student Victor von Doom (Toby Kebbell), soon to become, no surprise to anyone, the ultimate villain.
Brilliant but temperamental, Victor is a computer programmer and hacker lured back to the Institute by Dr. Storm, as Victor had been previously working on the technology which Reed finalized with the Quantum Gate device.
Again, not surprisingly, the amateur astronauts’ mission goes horribly awry, leading to an explosion upon re-entry. Reed, Johnny and Ben are seriously injured, while Victor goes missing while walking around on the surface of another dimension that resembles a primordial Earth, simmering like residue of a volcanic eruption.
Sue, who stayed behind in the lab, is also seriously hurt when the space shuttle returns to its platform. Tim Blake Nelson’s Dr. Allen, the gum-chewing, unscrupulous Baxter board chairman, is only too quick to throw the quartet of young scientists under the bus.
As a result, the government quickly relocates the four young people to a top secret facility known as Area 57, where they are contained and probed like the alien beings they are suspected of having become.
Soon, the quartet exhibits unique physical conditions that provide them with incredible abilities. Reed can stretch his limbs into extraordinary shapes. Johnny can set himself on fire, becoming known as the Human Torch.
Sue can render herself invisible and create powerful force fields. Unlike the others who can go back to their original human condition, Ben is transformed into a permanent hulking rock creature known as The Thing, which becomes an incredibly destructive military weapon.
When Victor von Doom resurfaces, he ushers in the dawn of a new Armageddon because his previous bad temperament has metastasized into full-blown hatred for Planet Earth and civilization.
The inevitable confrontation on the forbidden lava-encrusted planet between Doom and the Fantastic Four arrives at a predictable conclusion, but with only a modicum of exciting action worthy of a superhero franchise.
The best thing going for “Fantastic Four” is that it clocks in at less than two hours, and adding to regret when extra scenes don’t materialize, be warned that the end credits seem to run forever.
Beyond the hard core fan base for the Marvel Comics-to-big screen efforts, reasons to sit through “Fantastic Four” are difficult to formulate into a cohesive argument.
One senses that, in general, the superhero cinematic universe is not well-served by this entry.
Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.
Twenty years ago my wife and I had visitors from New York, and their car broke down on a country road about a mile from our home.
One of them panicked because there were no phone booths from which to call for help. Nebraska is a place where there can be a lot of room between one land-line and the next.
Carol V. Davis of California did a residency at Homestead National Monument, and this is one of the poems that came out of it.
Animal Time
I do better in animal time, a creeping dawn, slow ticking toward dusk. In the middle of the day on the Nebraska prairie, I’m unnerved by subdued sounds, as if listening through water, even the high-pitched drone of the cicadas faint; the blackbirds half-heartedly singing. As newlyweds, my parents drove cross country to Death Valley, last leg of their escape from New York, the thick soups of their immigrant mothers, generations of superstitions that squeezed them from all sides. They camped under stars that meant no harm. It was the silence that alerted them to danger. They climbed back into their tiny new car, locked its doors and blinked their eyes until daylight.
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation ( www.poetryfoundation.org ), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. They do not accept unsolicited submissions. Poem copyright 2013 by Carol V. Davis, “Animal Time,” from Harpur Palate, (Vol. 13, No. 1, summer/fall 2013). Poem reprinted by permission of Carol V. Davis and the publisher. Introduction copyright 2015 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-06.
Several years ago I published a children’s book about a bag in the wind, so it’s no wonder I love this poem by April Lindner, who lives in Pennsylvania.
Once you start noticing these wind-blown bags, you see them everywhere.
Lindner's most recent book is “This Bed Our Bodies Shaped” (Able Muse Press, 2012).
Carried Away
One rainy night we sat in traffic and, overtired in back, you saw a wind-whipped grocery bag afloat beyond the clutch of jagged branches, swept by gusts and whirled in eddies. A sudden downdraft swooped it earthward, where it danced till with a whoosh a current luffed it past the power lines. Disowned by gravity, small ghost not yet snagged by twiggy fingers, it couldn’t reach the earth. Thin-skinned, it pulsed, translucent jellyfish. You wept and pled to be let out into the dark and slanted rain, somehow to save that desolate thing. The light turned green and still you begged, Go back, go back, on its behalf, caught and held, bossed and tossed by a will much greater than its own.
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation ( www.poetryfoundation.org ), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. They do not accept unsolicited submissions. Poem copyright 2010 by April Lindner, “Carried Away,” from The Hudson Review, (Vol. LXIII, no. 1, Spring 2010). Poem reprinted by permission of April Lindner and the publisher. Introduction copyright 2015 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-06.
MIDDLETOWN, Calif. – Over the past few weeks lives in Lake County have been dominated by the powerful intensity of nature through fire.
NATURE!, a new exhibit, opens Saturday, Aug. 15, with a reception from 6 to 8 pm, and will be on view until Sept. 27 at the Middletown Art Center, 21456 State Highway 175.
Who is master – nature or man? This new exhibit features work by 20 artists reflecting on the relationship between nature, humanity and art; highlighting wood, metal, earth, wax, or light; raw, fired, woven, beaten; sculpted, painted, printed, combined; captured on film or shaped into form.
NATURE! also will include the adjacent lot on the corner of highways 29 and 175 to showcase art work “in dialogue with nature.”
The center hopes to further develop the lot into a permanent sculpture garden, making an inviting addition to Middletown for residents and visitors to enjoy.
Openings at the new center have been well-attended and well-received. The receptions highlight art, music and community. In addition, The Middletown Art Center showcases other vibrant cultural events, and has become a compelling addition to life in Lake County.
Located at the junction of highways 29 and 175 in Middletown, the old Main Street Pavilion – Gymnasium has been transformed into a beautiful space for contemporary art and performance events.
The back portion of the building serves as a studio where classes in drawing, painting, ceramics and more, are offered for children, teens and adults.
The Middletown Art Center is open Thursdays, noon to 6 p.m.; Fridays and Saturdays, noon to 7 p.m.; Sundays, 1 to 6 p.m.; or by appointment.
To check class offerings, or find out how to become a member or contribute, visit www.MiddletownArtCenter.org , call 707-809-8118 or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .
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