Screenings: American Honey
I live in the outskirts of Sebastopol, so the so-called “mag crews” don’t appear at my front door. But when we lived in Hermosa Beach, they were a several-times-a-week fixture. Those hucksters were always young, always vulnerable, and always poised for the “kill” of getting you to sign up for unneeded magazines. Writer/director Andrea Arnold has fleshed out a New York Times article by Ian Urbana into American Honey, the 162-minute-long, sex, drugs and hip-hop filled, cross-country odyssey taken by Star (Sasha Lane), a luckless teen desperate to escape her groping father and the 24-hours-a-day responsibility of caring for her younger siblings. Star finds her means of escape in a Walmart by flirting with Jake (Shia LeBoeuf) the scruffy-looking oldest member of a group of teens who are escorted out by store security. “If you want a job,” Jake tells Star, “be at the Motel 6 tomorrow morning.”
Many more chapters to come
It’s only just beginning. Hundreds and hundreds of first-person accounts of both tragedy and loss and heroics and generosity will soon grow into thousands of interwoven threads that will become the history of the firestorm of October 2017. With time, the beginning hours of the wind-whipped firebombs and mass evacuations that started with a spark on Oct. 7 and 8 will be joined in historic texts by countless tales of rescue, relief and recovery.
This Week in H’burg: The North pole.
Note: This week in H’burg is a new weekly column featuring photos and fun facts from local photographer Pierre Ratté. Each week we’ll feature a new photo from Ratté along with a fact about the subject matter of the photo.
Decoding Teenagers: Old fashioned
Do you remember your first crush? I do, it was in 8th grade, that final year before high school and adventures beyond. A first crush is kind of like a rite of passage.
Arts & Entertainment
Return to the Russian River
When Jake Messing stood in front of the mural he had just completed for Russian Riverkeeper on the north side of the nonprofit’s headquarters at 139 Healdsburg Ave., he had finished more than another mural. He had made a return to the source from the sea himself, like the salmon he portrayed.
