LAKEPORT, Calif. – “Art from the Heart,” an art show and sale to benefit Operation Tango Mike, will take place on Saturday, June 15.
The fundraiser will be held from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Lakeport Senior Center, 527 Konocti Ave.
Lifelong artist Pat Skoog will show a variety of her works and a portion of sales proceeds will benefit Operation Tango Mike in sending care packages to deployed military personnel.
Light refreshments will be available.
For more information call 707-349-2838 or 707-263-1303, or e-mail This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .
LOWER LAKE, Calif. – The Lake Community Pride Foundation will present “An Evening with … XL” on Saturday, June 8.
The show will take place from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. at the Lower Lake High School Little Theater, on the campus at 9430 Lake St. Doors open at 6:30 p.m.
Tickets are $10 with all proceeds going to promote youth performing arts.
XL is made up of five members. Tom Xavier, one of the two singers, has been writing songs for over four decades while Chad Leeburg has been writing songs for most of his adult life. Leeburg has opened for Bonnie Raitt and Carlos Santana among many other musical achievements to his name.
Max Lehman has been playing with Xavier for over two years and is only 17 years old. “Lehman is a great example of what is possible when young people are given the chance to explore the potential of creative activities,” said Xavier.
Lehman is seen as a musical prodigy by XL. Besides playing a multitude of instruments, Lehman has the innate ability to feel the music and respond in a spontaneous manner, always on beat and always with the right note.
Wade Osborne is the lead percussionist. He is the backbone of the rhythm section. His innovative beats and approach to drumming adds a unique sound to the group’s mix.
Ryan Xavier plays the box drum and has been playing with Leeburg and Osborne since grade school.
Don’t miss out on a great family show where XL will feature an organic, honest, fun, non-altered musical experience.
The group offers a wide spectrum of ages with Tom Xavier (60) and Lehman (17) and offers music that will keep you humming long after the show will be over. This is an evening you don’t want to miss.
If anyone is unfamiliar with the “Fast & Furious” franchise, it’s a fair guess that person has been living under a rock or is a captive in the police state of North Korea where American films are banned.
Except for the disdain of pretentious, high-brow film critics, “Fast & Furious,” running strong in its fifth sequel on the fast-paced thrills of underground car-racing, is enormously popular with the Cineplex crowd.
“Fast & Furious 6” is a laudable successor to “Fast Five,” when the grease monkey crew, lead by Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel), first met up with the no-nonsense federal Agent Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson), a man with even more muscles than Toretto.
Once again, the racing enthusiasts, mostly accustomed to running outside the law, are drawn back into a high-stakes assignment that might ordinarily fall into the domain of a James Bond-type adventure.
Since the Brazilian heist, the crew has been laying low, with ex-cop Brian O’Connor (Paul Walker) living with his wife Mia (Jordana Brewster) and baby child in the Canary Islands.
Dom, Brian and the entire gang remain fugitives from the law, constantly looking over their shoulders, no matter where they travel. Previous good deeds don’t get them a free pass.
Agent Hobbs reenters the picture with an offer the gang could refuse, but if they did there’d be no movie full of fast car chases with vast amounts of destruction and mayhem left in their wake.
The assignment involves taking down the malevolent leader of an elusive criminal outfit, one that has targeted the defense capabilities of the Western world, including an American military base in Europe.
The villain is a bloke with a British accent named Owen Shaw (Luke Evans), who’s got his hands on a nuclear weapon designed for annihilation of the West. Ernst Stavro Blofeld would be proud of his evil ambitions.
Other than the fact that Dom and Brian love to drive fast cars on crowded streets, what’s in it for the gang?
Hobbs offers all of them full pardons if they will come to London and get behind the wheel to take down Shaw’s organization.
Complicating matters somewhat is the reappearance of Dom’s old girlfriend Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), who suffers from amnesia but still remembers how to deliver powerful kicks and punches.
Ludacris and Tyrese Gibson are back to provide some comic relief and tech support. Gal Gadot, very much the beautiful model-type, knows her way around fast cars, while Sung Kang knows his way around this lovely crew member.
Fast car chases take place in the narrow streets of London, with plenty of vehicles getting rammed and flipped in the air like an automotive circus act. Later the action gets ramped up to a tank on a highway chase.
The best, and yet most ludicrous, chase of all involves the villain’s cargo plane trying to achieve lift-off while dragging several of the crew’s cars attached to towing hooks.
You may take a deep breath long enough to realize that this one sequence takes so long that it has to be the world’s longest runway. But like most things in this film, the incredulous does not matter.
Let’s be clear about one thing: “Fast & Furious 6,” like its worthy predecessors, is mindless entertainment of the first order. But it is exceedingly good and provides great payoffs for action junkies.
There’s no sense denying that everyone needs to check their brains at the door. Realism is an expendable commodity. All you need to do is to hang on for a great ride filled with excitement and stimulation.
Some critics have so much contempt that they will arrogantly claim that the film appeals to, in the words of one unnamed source, “the least-common denominator audience.”
I shall wear this offense to the general populace as a “badge of honor.” What we have here is cartoon fun in great abundance. A condescending, patronizing and pompous attitude is unnecessary and counterproductive. Insulting the audience’s taste is no way to win an argument about a film’s merits.
If you enjoyed most, if not all, of the “Fast & Furious” films, particularly the last one set in Brazil, you will likely find this sixth entry to be a winner.
“Fast & Furious 6” tips its hand at the end with the introduction of a well-known British action figure. Yes, number 7 is on its way, and it could get interesting.
Tim Riley writes film and television reviews for Lake County News.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – In June, Poets and Writers, a national organization that supports working writers, renewed their grant to the Lake County Arts Council and The Writers Circle.
This grant supports the free public writing workshop offered monthly in Lakeport at the Main Street Art Gallery, 325 N. Main St., at 6:30 p.m. on the first Thursday of each month.
The Lake County Arts Council sponsors the workshop, and former Lake County Poet Laureate Mary McMillan facilitates it.
Residents from all over Lake County are welcome to attend the Writers Circle and join other writers who share memoirs, fiction, essays or poems they have written – or just listen and get inspired.
More seasoned writers and writers just beginning join together to offer feedback, build skills and find new ideas.
Aged 19 to 90, some people come only one or two times, and others show up every month.
Poets and Writers provides this grant through a grant it has received from the James Irvine Foundation.
For more information contact Mary McMillan at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .
Lots of us find ourselves under the interested fingers of dermatologists, who prosper on the fun we once had out in the sun.
Here George Bilgere of Ohio, one of our most amusing American poets, sits back in his skin doctor’s chair and reminisces about a party that took place years ago.
Basal Cell
The sun is still burning in my skin even though it set half-an-hour ago, and Cindy and Bob and Bev and John are pulling on their sweatshirts and gathering around the fire pit.
John hands me a cold one and now Bev comes into my arms and I can feel the sun’s heat, and taste the Pacific on her cheek.
I am not in Vietnam, nor is John or Bob, because our deferments came through, and we get to remain boys for at least another summer like this one in Santa Cruz, surfing the afternoons in a sweet blue dream I’m remembering now,
as the nurse puts my cheek to sleep, and the doctor begins to burn those summers away.
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 George Bilgere, whose most recent book of poems is The White Museum, Autumn House Press, 2010. Poem reprinted by permission of George Bilgere. 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. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.
You can’t get closer to our hunter-gatherer ancestors than by clawing in the earth with your fingers. Here’s a delightful poem about digging for bait by Marsha Truman Cooper, a Californian.
A Knot of Worms
As day began to break, we passed the “honk for worms” sign, passed it honking again and again, to wake up the worms my dad said. It was only about another half mile to the aspen grove and our worm digs. The humus, spongy and almost black, turned over easily. I used my bare hands to put some moist earth into a coffee can and, as the aspen glittered in the risen sun, I gently slid the fresh, fat bait into my container. I heard the worms still in the ground gurgle as they tried to escape, while the ones in the can began to ball up as their numbers grew. Streamside, surrounded by mountains with snow lingering into summer, I picked out a worm and my dad arranged it on the hook to save my small fingers. Now you can purchase a time-share on that land. The colony of aspen, thinned by the builders, continues to tremble. No amount of honking brings back the worms.
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 Marsha Truman Cooper. In 2013, Finishing Line Press will publish the chapbook, A Knot of Worms. Poem reprinted by permission of Marsha Truman Cooper. 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.
