CLEARLAKE, Calif. – The Clear Lake Chamber of Commerce will hold its 70th Birthday Party Celebration and Fundraiser beginning at 5:30 p.m. Friday, Nov. 1.

The event will take place at the Clearlake Community/Senior Center, 3245 Bowers Ave.

The highlight of the event will be a performance by comedian Joe Klocek.

Klocek's crowd involving hilarious storytelling has earned him a great list of comedic accomplishments including appearing on Comedy Central’s, “Live at Gotham” NBC's “Last Comic Standing,” commentator for the Emmy Award-winning documentary “A Bridge so Far” and co-creator of the critically acclaimed storytelling show, “Previously Secret Information.”

He also has been a runner-up in the “San Francisco International Comedy Competition” and the “Seattle Comedy Competition,” and voted “Best Comic” in the 2011 SF Weekly Readers Poll.

The night also will feature a special presentation honoring the past CLCC presidents and officers.

Dance music and other entertainment will be provided by Tony Barthel of the Featherbed Railroad.

The no-host bar will include local wines from Steele Wines, Moore Family Winery, Six Sigma Ranch and Winery, Casey Flat Ranch, Cougar’s Leap Winery, Laujor Estate Winery and Brassfield Estates.

Tickets are $30 per person and include a gourmet steak and chicken dinner with dessert. Tickets can be purchased by calling 707-994-3600, going to www.facebook.com/ClearLakeChamber or emailing www.clcccontactgmail.com . A limited number of tickets will be available at the door.

The Clear Lake Chamber of Commerce is a membership organization dedicated to developing, promoting, and serving your business and community.

Its goal is to sustain a unique and high quality of life by achieving economic vitality, with sensitivity and respect for the environment as we foster economic opportunity and a favorable business climate within the region.

If you are not getting enough of “Masterpiece” or the running of old episodes of “Downton Abbey” on PBS, then the Starz cable channel has a special treat in the five-episode series “Dancing on the Edge.”

Understandably, Starz is hopefully filling the gap while fans of British period costume dramas await the fourth season of “Downton Abbey,” scheduled to start in January 2014.

Adjusting to a competitive cable marketplace, Starz is just now concluding its series run of “The White Queen,” a British television drama about royal palace intrigue set against the backdrop of the War of the Roses.

Unfortunately, Starz discovered that interesting dramas like “Boss” and “Magic City,” both series set uniquely on the American stage, one involving raw politics and the other the glitter of Miami Beach, didn’t have staying power.

“Dancing on the Edge” may not be a tip of the scales to an Anglophile programming trend at Starz, but there is undeniable appeal to many of the British imports that are now thriving on American television.

Loosely inspired by the true accounts of the iconic Duke Ellington Band mingling with royalty in Europe during the Great Depression, “Dancing on the Edge” is entirely fictional but no less compelling than the obvious societal challenges faced by black jazz musicians during that era.

British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Louis Lester, who starts his own band and dreams of introducing American jazz music to the United Kingdom during the early 1930’s. He’s almost immediately befriended by ambitious journalist Stanley Mitchell (Matthew Goode).

Writing for Music Express magazine, Stanley has an eye for talent. He discovers and becomes enamored with the Louis Lester Band while they are performing in a basement jazz club that apparently caters to more bohemian tastes.

Stanley immediately signs them to headline at the illustrious Imperial Hotel. At first, the hotel’s older, elite audience is hostile or indifferent to the band, owing to racial prejudice and the lack of familiarity with jazz music.

But the younger crowd of aristocrats is enchanted by this new music and invites the members to play at a garden party, where Prince George, the Duke of Kent, is in awe of the private performance, taking notice of the lead singer Jessie (Angel Coulby).

Writer and director Stephen Poliakoff is no stranger to period drama. He penned a note to critics in which he revealed that during research for his drama “The Lost Prince” he discovered that Prince George’s passion of jazz music was absolutely genuine.

Poliakoff learned that Prince George patrolled the clubs of London with his eldest brother David, the Prince of Wales, to explore the music of different bands, and the two princes mixed with the musicians and invited some of them into their homes.

Again, the Louis Lester Band’s interaction with royalty is entirely fictional, but there is little doubt that visiting American musicians like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong were given an enthusiastic welcome in London.

Still, against the backdrop of the worldwide financial meltdown of 1929, Britain endured an enormous gulf between rich and poor, and society was torn by racism and prejudice, especially among the aristocracy and the ruling class.

Yet, at the same time, certain black musicians were blending with high society, playing at their parties and even having love affairs with them. The latter is the case when Louis meets attractive society photographer Sarah (Janet Montgomery).

Not only royalty pays attention to the band, the mysterious American mogul Masterson (John Goodman), who loves jazz and resides at the Imperial, senses popular culture and journalism about to explode and he becomes obsessed with potential lucrative opportunities.

Meanwhile, the eccentric aristocrat Lady Cremone (Jacqueline Bisset) known for discovering unknown talent is persuaded by Stanley to become a key player in propelling the career of the Louis Lester Band.

“Dancing on the Edge” is ambitious for the number of stories that are told. It’s about more than the rise of a popular musical genre. Race and class issues run deep throughout.

England in the 1930s was a time when certain musicians could find themselves one week on the verge of being deported and the very next week fraternizing with the ruling elite at a great country home.

Sudden success and the acclaim of London society are heady experiences for the Louis Lester Band. Just at the height of their fame, one terrible event overtakes them and they get to discover which members of their elite fan club are truly genuine in their support.

“Dancing on the Edge,” beautifully evoking the 1930s, is entertaining on many levels, including the mystery element that should remain a surprise. Of course, the music is excellent, making for a terrific soundtrack.

Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.

Perhaps you’ve experienced the sudden, unsettling intimacy of putting on somebody else’s jacket and finding a wad of tissue in the pocket. Here’s a fine poem by Debra Nystrom, raised in South Dakota and now teaching in Virginia.

Little Parka

Dream of Mom’s red parka gone—
someone stole it right out of the closet
of the burned-down house—what
good could it do anybody else, broken
zipper that always got caught,
she’d jimmy it loose, just part
of putting it on—and she was so tiny,
the arms too short even for me,
too-tiny gloves in the pockets, thumbs
stubby, practically useless to anyone
but her—they deserve it if they shove in
a hand, find the tissue she used and then
left there who knows which cold day,
what she needed it for, or why.

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. Poem copyright 2009 by Debra Nystrom, from her most recent book of poems, Bad River Road, Sarabande Books, 2009. Reprinted by permission of Debra Nystrom and the publisher. Introduction copyright 2013 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 2004-2006. They do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

I open every spring with a garden more precisely laid out and cared for than the year before, and by the end of summer it’s collapsed into a tangle of weeds, bugs and disorder.

Here’s Gabriel Welsch, a poet from Pennsylvania, carrying a similar experience right into winter.

A Garden’s End

Forsythia, scaled and bud-bangled,
I pruned to a thatch of leaves
for the curb, by the squirrel-gnawed
corn, silk strewn, kernels tooth carved
and husks shorn over the ground
pocked with paw prints.

The borers mashed the squash vine,
the drought tugged the roots of sage,
catmint languished by the sidewalk,
tools grew flowers of rust.

That winter we left our hope
beneath the snow, loved through the last
of the onions, watched the late leeks freeze
to crystal, bent like sedges, their shadows
on the snow. That winter we left
our hope beneath the snow.

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. Poem copyright 2012 by Gabriel Welsch from his most recent book of poems, The Death of Flying Things, WordTech Editions, 2012. Poem reprinted by permission of Gabriel Welsch and the publisher. Introduction copyright 2013 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 2004-2006. They do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

HIDDEN VALLEY LAKE, Calif. – A Big Read partnership with Mt. High Coffee and Books will host a young people’s talent show on Saturday, Oct. 26.

The event begins at 7 p.m. at the coffee shop’s Hidden Valley shopping center location, 18983 Hartmann Road.

Dress in costume if you wish and support the student performances to benefit the Middletown Unified School District music program.

The Big Read is designed to restore reading to the center of American culture.

Lake County is one of 77 communities across the country to receive a 2013-14 Big Read grant award.

For more information, visit the www.NEABigRead.org Web site or contact program director for the Lake County Big Read, Robin Fogel-Shrive, at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

MACHETE KILLS (Rated R)

As film director and writer, Robert Rodriguez has a definite style, one that for the most part fits nicely into the exploitation genre that once dominated “grindhouse” theaters.

The Rodriguez approach to filmmaking has had so much similarity to Quentin Tarantino’s that the two of them collaborated on the 2007 double feature “Grindhouse,” consisting of Rodriguez’s “Planet Terror” and Tarantino’s “Death Proof.”

For the uninitiated, “Machete Kills” is the sequel to “Machete,” both of which starred the tough, menacing Danny Trejo in the titular role as a former Mexican Federale still teamed up with Jessica Alba’s agent Sartana Rivera.

Like parachuting into the second half of a serial franchise, there’s little point to joining the exploits of the machete-wielding hero (yes, Trejo is the good guy) without having seen the first film, though the real reason is to appreciate the quirky experience to the fullest.

“Machete Kills” is the contemporary version of the exploitation experience that was brought vividly to the screen with African-American actors like Richard Roundtree (“Shaft”), James Brown, Pam Grier, Fred Williamson and a host of others during the 1970s.

Back then, it was called “blaxploitation,” focusing on the urban landscape with a wide variety of criminal enterprises involved, from drug trafficking to prostitution. The genre stirred controversy and even opprobrium from civil rights organizations.

Today, the “Machete” franchise generates little heat, other than critical derision from some film critics who may be operating under the misguided impression that this kind of B-movie should offer more than gratuitous absurdity.

Rodriguez has performed impressively in films like “El Mariachi” and “Desperado,” but one must understand that having Sofia Vergara as a brothel madam equipped with a machine-gun bra is a sign that “Machete Kills” is not to be taken seriously.

“Machete” fans will be thrilled with the film’s opening, as a garish trailer heralds the next splatter-fest with “Machete Kills Again … in Space,” which might even be inspired by the late Ed Wood’s “Plan Nine from Outer Space” or the detritus of other sci-fi junk.

Trejo’s Machete is a man of few words, sort of like the Man with No Name in spaghetti Westerns, which is fitting since he spends much of his time on the dusty, untamed desert of the Arizona-Mexico border, dealing with vicious thugs from Mexican drug cartels.

With a fixed facial expression, Machete, never smiling or winking at the illogical proceedings, growls his trademark one-liners before slicing various body parts from assorted bad guys.

A renegade enforcer, Machete is enlisted by off-kilter U.S. President Rathcock (Charlie Sheen who’s credited under his birth name, Carlos Estevez) to assassinate Mexican madman Mendez (Demian Bichir).

Adding to the mystery, Mendez has a split personality. He’s either a zealous revolutionary or a drug cartel leader surrounded by vicious henchmen. In any case, he’s got the trigger for a nuke aimed at Washington, D.C. surgically implanted on his chest.

Machete’s handler in the field is Miss San Antonio, a blond bombshell (Amber Heard), who is also a deadly assassin in her own right and a schizophrenic that is very much at home in the lunacy of this exploitative B-movie world.

To everyone’s delight, tough gal Michelle Rodriguez returns, though late in the story, as Luz, leader of an underground network that joins forces with Machete just at the right time.

As loco as he is, Mendez turns out to be fronting for a more sinister villain, arms dealer and space visionary Luther Voz (Mel Gibson), who is putting together a space mission to escape an inevitable nuclear destruction of Earth that he is trying to engineer.

Meanwhile, as Machete makes his way across the treacherous terrain of Mexico back to the United States with Mendez in tow, he is pursued by a chameleon-like assassin who constantly changes his identity.

Reminiscent of Martin Landau and Leonard Nimoy in the “Mission Impossible” TV series, the chameleon pulls off masks to reveal a new disguise. The fun is seeing the part played by Lady Gaga, Antonio Banderas and Cuba Gooding Jr.

The best thing about “Machete Kills” and the franchise so far is that it is campy good fun, a spoof as well as parody of the exploitation genre. Nonetheless, Robert Rodriguez delights in old tropes of the “grindhouse” era.

In less capable hands, “Machete Kills” wouldn’t be as much gory, ridiculous fun, and would lack the stellar cast. In other words, without Rodriguez at the helm, this would be the type of cheesy film relegated to 2 a.m. showings on a cable channel.

Machete often tells us what he won’t do. In the first film, it was “Machete don’t text.” Here it is “Machete don’t tweet.”

What he won’t do in outer space, we can only guess. For fans of this cult franchise, here’s hoping Robert Rodriguez delivers on his intergalactic promise.

Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.