Over the past eight years I've contributed numerous features and Shop Talk pieces to the East Bay Monthly, a literary and commerce magazine in the San Francisco Bay Area. For my work on Shop Talk I've loved getting to know the new shopkeepers in town and, hopefully giving them a little boost in traffic. By now, however, I can usually tell which ones will survive, and which won't. These two recent ones are, I believe, keepers.


Modernaire

Step into Berkeley’s Modernaire, and you’re instantly transported back to the midcentury world of Mad Men. Red, orange, turquoise, and chartreuse Murano art glass pops against Paul Frankl’s white, treated-cork tables. You can almost see a Brylcreemed Don Draper, whiskey glass in one hand, ever-present cigarette in the other, reposing on the tweed-covered Scandinavian love seat.

Photo by Spiral-A Photography

Bee Healthy Honey

Verdant valleys carpeted with wildflowers: not our Western vision of Yemen. But for Khaled Almghafi, proprietor of Bee Healthy Honey Shop in Oakland, these are vivid images from his childhood. “Yes, we do have deserts filled with acacias from which we get acacia honey,” he explains. “But we also have mountains and on the beautiful island of Socotra, off the coast, very rare plants. That honey goes for $180 a kilo in France.”

http://www.themonthly.com/shoptalk1004.html

Joyride Art Show Review

Published in the San Francisco Weekly on-line blog "All Shook Down"

by Andrea Pflaumer

http://blogs.sfweekly.com/shookdown/2009/07/last_night_joyride_art_show_at.php

Kirtan Chanting in America

My article on kirtan chanting for Michael Laughrin's North American Jyotish newsletter:

In the not-so-distant past, before Homeland Security measures rendered airport lobbies off-limits, the only "orange alerts" to which weary travelers were subjected were gatherings of young people in saffron robes handing out tracts and chanting the names of Hindu deities: "Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare." Back in the 1970's, the so-called Hare Krishnas raised ecstatic voices and "kundalinis" with their intoxicating drumbeats, encouraging all within earshot to turn their minds to God...

http://www.jyotish.ws/wisdom/kirtan_chanting.html

Photo of Krishna Das courtesy of KD

Beyond Kumbaya



When Lara Mendel takes the stage at the Mosaic Project’s 500-person fund-raiser at the Berkeley Marina, the room has the feel of a concert at the Fillmore. Amid thunderous applause, the executive director of this unique Bay Area camp speaks in inner-city cadences and with phrases peppered with “y’alls” to deliver the salient message of her program as articulated by poet Audre Lorde: “It’s not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept and celebrate these differences.”

Mendel leads the audience in an exercise called “Popcorn, Firecracker, Toast,” inviting the crowd to “pop up” if they’ve ever been subjected to any of a litany of discriminations, whether it’s because of race, ethnicity, class, gender, religion, sexual orientation, disability, for wearing glasses or braces, for the way they talk or the shape of their body. “Pop up if someone ever hurt you and you have been too afraid to say anything about it,” says Mendel. “Pop up if you’ve ever stood by and watched while someone else was hurt and did nothing.”

(Photo by Brian Cuellar)

Read the entire story:

http://www.themonthly.com/up-front-09-08.html

Upper Crust: Reprinted from Real Food, in the East Bay Monthly:


http://www.mindfully.org/Food/2006/Bay-Area-Bread1nov06.htm