NAPA, Calif. – The Napa County Board of Supervisors recently named local resident Jeremy Benson as the community’s new poet laureate.

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MIDDLETOWN, Calif. – The Middletown Art Center will feature the Shannon Ridge Family of Wines for Palette to Palate – an intimate pairing of art and wine – on Saturday, Aug. 26, from 6 to 7:30 p.m.

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KELSEYVILLE, Calif. – The Konocti Art Society is once again hosting an art raffle to benefit a local organization.

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Just as I prefer to read good travel writing more than I like to travel, I look to poems to offer me experiences I'm quite likely never to have.

Here's a poem by Rebecca Macijeski, a native New Englander, about just such an experience, and a poignant one, too.

I'll never disassemble a piano, but I've experienced doing it, here.

Taking Apart My Childhood Piano

My mother and I sit on the back porch,
bare feet in summer grass
as we take the upright down to pieces,
breeze humming through its strings.

I extract each melodic tooth and sort them
in octaves for rinsing, tidy enclosure in boxes,
remembering in each how my young fingers
rioted over them searching for sound

and the way it grows like its own
unruly animal. The old piano
lies open to Sunday morning sun,
swallowing blossoms that drift over like stars

from the apple tree I climbed as a girl.
My mother and I sit here in a quiet
usually reserved for churches,
hands moving slowly over what we gather

—piles of soft hammers, odd coils of wire.
We take up wet rags and wash each wooden key
down its surface, wet music
pooling onto our skin.

American Life in Poetry does not accept unsolicited submissions. It 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. Introduction copyright © 2017 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.

TV CORNER: GET SHORTY ON EPIX

Cable channel EPIX is relatively new to the business of original programming, but they may be getting the hang of coming up with decent product.

The second season of “Berlin Station” and “Graves” is soon to come but, meanwhile, the third entry is happening now.

The new 10-episode series has a familiar name in “Get Shorty,” given its pedigree of being “based in part on the novel by Elmore Leonard.”

The semantics of that description is essential to knowing that the series veers from the novel as well as the 1995 film of the same title.

Miami loan shark Chili Palmer (played in the movie by John Travolta) is nowhere to be found in the TV series.

Instead, the hood with dreams of making it big in Hollywood is Irish actor Chris O’Dowd’s Miles Daly, a hitman from Nevada who wants to leave behind his criminal past.

Of course, given that even a series based only in part on an Elmore Leonard novel does not escape the prolific author’s idiosyncratic style in writing crime fiction, the TV series may have to convince the purists to put aside any doubts.

Miles and his best friend Louis (Sean Bridgers) are the muscle for a crime ring based in Pahrump, Nevada, a dusty town located in the middle of nowhere sixty miles from Vegas but closer to Death Valley.

The gang is involved in everything from gambling and prostitution to drug running and extortion. The leader is the matronly Amara (Lidia Porto) assisted by her primary henchman Yago (Goya Robles), a hot-tempered, trigger-happy moron with the brains of a beans and cheese burrito.

Flashbacks inform us that Amara was raised in a harsh environment in rural Guatemala and that a hard early life molded her into a ruthless crime boss who is now looking to find new ways to launder cash into a legitimate front.

Maybe it’s fortuitous that Miles has dreams of becoming a movie producer in Hollywood after a botched hit job in Los Angeles results in his possession of a dandy movie script for a costume drama set in England.

With his wife Katie (Lucy Walters) having grown weary of his illegitimate career, Miles wants to win her back from a slick golf pro by taking an improbable leap into the movies without the slightest idea how to navigate the cutthroat yet glamorous business in Tinseltown.

Spending more time in the pleasant California climate, Miles meets Rick Moreweather (Ray Romano), relegated to a crummy studio office that reflects his status of a washed-up producer of low-quality films that go straight to video.

Moreweather is desperately hanging onto the rungs of Hollywood relevancy and is constantly brushed aside by go-getter studio executive April Quinn (Megan Stevenson) who takes an initial fascination with Miles’ bold and assertive push for a script no one at the studio has even read.

In the world of Elmore Leonard, the conceit is that thugs in love with the movies are seduced by the glamorous notion of making movies. The humor comes from quirky things like tough guy Miles saying he can’t read a script in a car because it makes him carsick.

As much as Miles wants his criminal history to become something of the past, it keeps rearing its ugly head at the most inopportune moments, including when Yago beats the golf pro senseless over a dispute about a parked car in front of Miles’ new Hollywood residence.

Back in Nevada, Amara and her goons are engaged in a violent turf war with a rival gang. Contrary to the wishes of Yago and his desire to use a tacky, loud nightclub for money laundering, Amara becomes enamored of the idea that she could finance a film that might star John Stamos.

Ray Romano’s Moreweather is delightfully sleazy as the B-movie producer who struggles with cost overruns and prima donna actors whose passions are limited to being serviced by prostitutes in their trailers.

Despite misgivings, Moreweather begrudgingly becomes Miles’ partner to film the script entitled “The Admiral’s Mistress” on a limited budget financed by underworld cash, even though his reservations give way to the reality of trying to keep his failing career afloat.

Three episodes of “Get Shorty” were made available for preview, and it is evident that unlike the movie the pace is definitely slower in order to stretch the intrigue to a larger timeframe. The characters may prove interesting enough for a long-term investment.

At the summer TV press tour, Chris O’Dowd had an interesting take on the difference between the film and the TV series, noting that both are using the same original material with the book but “it’s like visiting a bar at a different time of the week.”

“The movie’s kind of like going to a bar on a Saturday night when everybody’s looking well,” said O’Dowd, and “we kind of visit the bar at 3 a.m. on a Thursday, when the floor is kind of sticky. And the bar bill’s about to arrive and you can’t afford to pay it.”

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

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife, or CDFW, is conducting an art contest to select the design for the state's 2017-2018 upland game bird stamp.

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