Barry's Life in Napa Blog

Yesterday a Starbucks opened at First and Main in downtown Napa. It is across the street from the long-time popular Napa Valley Coffee Roasting Company. Reaction to the event falls into one of three categories: 1.  Cool, that's convenient. 2. There was a corner somewhere that didn't already have a Starbucks? 3. APOCALYPSE!! GO TO YOUR BUNKERS!! THE CORPORATIONS HAVE EATEN YOUR BRAIN!! Having shed most all vestiges of brand loyalty long ago, I mercilessly vote with my feet and dollars in the most selfish ways; meaning, I buy stuff wherever it makes sense to me at the moment. My decision might be based on price once in awhile, but more often it's just convenience. To wit, this morning I wanted a coffee. I proceeded to the ground zero of Napa's new worldview-meets-retail thrill ride, First and Main. Finding that I was on the Coffee Roasting Company side of Main Street and Starbucks was 100 feet further to go, I opted for the immediate solution - but the line insi...

Ever have a burr under your saddle about something and no one to complain to? Feel like you could Tweet it till Christmas but no one would notice? I did - a complaint about an annoying trend in live theatre. I decided to open my big fat mouth and say something about it, and wrote this piece for Howlround , which is a website for theatre nerds like me. http://www.howlround.com/here%E2%80%99s-your-hat-what%E2%80%99s-your-hurry-by-barry-martin/

This was NOT the "Greek" topic I was thinking of. I was sitting around looking for an excuse for not memorizing the lines I need to memorize, and I started thinking about how I am part of a fairly small subset of American men today - those who were excited about both European Cup soccer and the Tony Awards in the same day - and naturally that led me to furrowing my brow over the prospect of the Greeks voting this week on whether to stick with the euro or not. My life is complicated and I'm sure you feel sorry for me. In any case, it seemed like the only option was to pour another large glass of cheap red wine and give this whole mess some thought. Strap in, here we go. We owe the Greeks a lot. They gave us the foundation for western civilization as we know it, developing essential concepts like democracy, geometry, and theatre, and useful things like maps, plumbing and baklava. Without the Greeks, we might not have the Olympics, and we might have never discove...

As an old, white, hetero male ("Four strikes and you're still not out, cracker?") I have no place taking part in any discussion about bias. But I will anyway, because, as history shows, the world needs old, white, hetero males to wander into problematic situations and quickly assemble solutions before toddling off to the club for a tot of gin. The problematic topic is gender bias in the theatre. Yesterday I attended a breakout session on this topic at the Theatre Bay Area annual conference. The very engaging moderator, Valerie Weak , is an actor who has started keeping track of who has a penis and who has a vagina in various productions, from the author to all the production staff to the actors on stage. She does this tracking on her blog here , and while the stats don't paint a picture of complete insanity, it shines a light on some odd things that are going on. In general, women have less opportunity to take part in theatre than men, and that seems to apply at a...

From "News of the Weird": ... in Tacoma, Wash., in March, corrections officer Alan O'Neill, 41, was charged with bigamy after his long-estranged first wife found out about the second one when Facebook suggested the two be "friends." - KOMO News (Seattle), 3-9-2012 From The Telegraph: Forced to choose between her man and her scaly reptile's health, Lizzie Griffiths chose the latter. The 25-year-old schoolteacher from the London area paid approximately $4,700 so George, her bearded dragon, could get chemotherapy for tumors in his face. "George will always come first." Griffiths told the Sun. "I fell in love with George the minute I saw him and knew I'd do anything to look after him properly." Chris Fisher, who's been in a relationship with Griffiths for 10 years, understood the warm affection that Griffiths has for a cold-blooded creature."They have a special bond."  From USA Today: A Denver woman has been charg...

If you'd like people to actually pay attention to your blog, and possibly even read it, I suggest the gratuitous use of this type of photo.  I was in the radio business for a long time. I usually say I was in commercial radio, to distinguish that form from public broadcasting. "Commercial" was the key word. Back then, public stations didn't air advertising like they do now - they just mentioned grants and foundations now and then in thankful, well-modulated tones. Over in commercial radio, we were all about the advertising. Ads paid our tiny salaries, and if you had good ratings and people liked you, maybe you could make a few bucks on the side endorsing someone's pizza place or auto shop. Commercials were important. We debated the proper length of commercial breaks for different programming formats, how the breaks should begin and end, whether we could make more selling two 30-second ads or one 60-second ad. We set rules for the maximum number of commercia...

Based on the recent alignment of Mars, Venus and the crescent moon, a series of revelatory dreams I have experienced, and the news that Adam Sandler has a net worth of $300 million , it is apparent that the long-awaited and overdue end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it is about to commence in the form of a chaotic zombiepocalypse. Evidence abounds that the brain-devouring undead are increasingly emboldened and unafraid to walk among us in the light of day. The most recent examples include the brazenly destructive and pathological behavior exhibited by Courtney of the current season of The Bachelor ; the inexplicable rise to fame of singer Lana del Ray ; and, of course, Mitt Romney. Further evidence of the aggressive new zombie behavior and invasion into the world of the living came to me during the writing of this essay, in the form of an email that reads: "I'm walking around wi t h a hu ge ;hear!t that won't stop beating wildly. That's because y.ou're with me. I h...

It's a play on words, see? I am pondering the condition known as "too much time on my hands." I am pondering this sitting in a room next to at least 75 books I have not read. A few feet away is a guitar that I play so rarely I have no calluses. I have an infinite number of browser tabs at my disposal to explore this new internet thing, a couple hundred satellite channels. And I haven't even opened my "Paparazzi" action figures playset that I got for Christmas. How is it, then, that there's a voice in my head - the voice of a whiny 12 year-old, it sounds like - that's saying "I have nothing to do." This fits into the category of First World Problems - a category of conundrums we all "suffer" with - and by "all" I mean people like me, of course. Examples from this perspective-correcting site include: “I’ve run out of obscure ethnic cuisines to impress my friends with.” “My internet-capable fridge only connects ...

A big, strong man dissolved in tears of joy...the climax of an aria...someone you love in a cap and gown...a new high score in Angry Birds - all of these things are just like the others. I speak of the moment of catharsis. Warning: Pedantry follows. Catharsis derives from the Greek word kathairein, meaning to purge, purify or clean. Aristotle used it first in a clinical sense, to describe effects of certain actions on the human body, and then later applied it metaphorically to drama and poetry. Being a $64 word, chances are more people have experienced it than have accessed the word to define the experience. Warning: Tortured metaphor follows. Catharsis is like a cheeseburger - it comes in many varieties, and you can have it your way. It's found in your direct, personal experience - when you are the one touching something universal - and vicariously, even in seeing that moment re-enacted in fiction -  and your heart leaps up. We seek it out on stages, on playing fields...

When things go wrong, there is only one thing on my mind - find someone to blame. Being the self-centered yet sensitive sociopath that I am, I rarely find my satisfactory scapegoat to be (a) me, or (b) another specific person So I am happy to report that the deficiency of blog posts on my part of late is not the fault of (a) me, or (b) another specific person But my good friend blame can be placed squarely on a faceless, heartless, brainless Corporation. (A timely scapegoat indeed, given the tenor of the times. All you one-percenter-shareholders-in-faceless-heartless-brainless corporations, take heed. I'm watching you.) The FHB Corporation in question is an alleged supplier of bandwidth, a commodity of importance to He Who Blogs - particularly he who blogs only in privacy and mostly late at night when the hour and the wine facilitates. There is a certain solitude required - a solitude the FHB Corp has refused to provide me for most of the last six months. I m...