UPPER LAKE, Calif. – The work of jewelry artist Barbara Barnaby from Kelseyville is featured during the month of July at the Upper Lake Mercantile.  

A reception featuring the artist will be held at the Main St. store in Upper Lake on Saturday, July 19 from 4 to 6 p.m.

Barnaby, who is self-taught, has been collecting antique and vintage materials for more than a decade.

Her style ranges from simple to extravagant with highly detailed layered floral elements which have been hand-colored, distressed to look vintage and to blend with the antique lace and other elements.

The vibe is very feminine with a bit of ladylike whimsy – a bit of Downton Abbey.

Inspirations for Barbara’s pieces are haute couture, past and present, the gorgeous needlework of antique laces and embroidery, botanical illustrations and hand colored prints.

The techniques used are basic to costume jewelry with tube riveting, common in the 1940s and 1950s, being revived and emphasized.

The stones are prong set and the smaller beads and pearls are wired and screen worked in the same technique used by Miriam Haskell in the 1940s to 1950s.

Barnaby's work has been acquired by private collectors in the United States and Japan, and her production pieces were sold by major department stores such as Nordstrom and Barneys New York.

When Barnaby became an registered nurse she discontinued her wholesale jewelry production, with the making of art to wear jewelry enjoyed in the evenings and weekends.

Located by the town clock in the old bank building at 9490 Main St., Upper Lake, the Upper Lake Mercantile offers quality artistic pieces plus items for the home and garden, with an emphasis on locally made and sourced goods.

A sister business to the Tallman Hotel and Blue Wing Saloon, also located on Main Street, Upper Lake Mercantile is intended to appeal to residents as well as visitors to Lake County.  

It is open daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

In August, the sculptural works of Ukiah’s Spencer Brewer will be featured at the Upper Lake Mercantile with an artist reception scheduled for Aug. 16.

Details about inventory and future promotions at the store can be obtained from manager Susan Saunders at 707-275-8018 or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

NICE, Calif. – Featherbed Railroad is hosting the CD release party for Whispering Light's new album, “One Tribe,” with a day and evening of wine, art displays, artisan booths, pizza-by-the-slice, fun and lots of music this Saturday, July 12.

The event is open to the public and starts at 11 a.m.

Musical performances are from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., and again at 7 p.m. with stage lighting on the veranda.

Travis Rinker also will be performing and jamming with Whispering Light.

Featherbed Railroad also is offering special overnight rates if you mention “Whispering Light.” Guests will be treated to a Sunday champagne brunch with an exclusive performance by Lindy Day on solo classical guitar.

Nationally acclaimed Whispering Light is the Lake County duo of Native American Music Awards nominee Kevin Village-Stone (Native American flutes, bass, keyboards) and award-winning guitarist Lindy Day (classical, acoustic, electric, saxophone, percussion).

This year, they released their new album “One Tribe” in 220 countries and 37 online retailers including iTunes, Amazon, Google and Sony.

Both being formally trained multi-instrumentalists, Stone and Day feature a captivating full-band sound even as a duo.

“Check our website for the latest tour dates, an entire video log of our coast-to-coast tour, free downloads, and behind-the-scenes footage. We love and appreciate all of our supporters especially those in Lake County like Tony and Peggy Barthel at Featherbed Railroad, who believe in us and have made all this possible,” said Day.

Featherbed Railroad Bed and Breakfast is located at 2870 Lakeshore Blvd. in Nice. More info can be found at www.FeatherbedRailroad.com .

For more information about Whispering Light, visit www.WhisperingLight.com .

For more information on Lindy Day, visit www.LindyDay.com .

CLEARLAKE, Calif. – There are ordinary, good nature documentaries – and then there are the two glorious (and free) films Second Sunday Cinema is screening on Sunday, July 13.

Each is about an hour long – come for one or both.

The venue is the Clearlake United Methodist Church, 14521 Pearl Ave. in Clearlake.

Doors open at 5:45 p.m., with the film beginning at 6 p.m.

The first film to be screened will be "My Life as a Turkey.” It follows naturalist Joe Hutto as he hatches, imprints and mothers a clutch of wild turkey eggs with such dedication he is accepted as a turkey not just by his new children, but by the other wild animals in the Florida outback.  

This beautifully made film allows the viewer to participate in the awe and wonder of this spiritual year-long experience.

The second film will be "Proteus: a Nineteenth Century Vision."  

Its central figure is Ernst Haekel, a biologist and watercolor artist who fell in love with the beauties of nature.

More specifically, he discovered the myriad forms of radiolaria, minute sea creatures who build an astounding array of incredibly beautiful exoskeletons – skeletons on the outside of their tiny bodies.  Haekel painted thousands of these.

Set to music by the filmmakers, who are totally attuned to the wonders depicted in the film, the radiolaria, and our hearts, dance. This gorgeous film is a stunning rarity you will remember the rest of your life.

The cooler at the church is fixed and softer chairs will be brought in from the church sanctuary.  

For more information call 707-889-7355.

TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION (Rated PG-13)

With the proliferation of sequels that allow the Hollywood film industry to not even break a sweat, it’s hardly a surprise that director Michael Bay, whose affinity for explosions is unsurpassed by anyone else, has churned out yet another “Transformers” movie.

“Transformers: Age of Extinction” is the fourth film in the franchise and the first one not to star Shia LaBeouf, whose legal troubles seem to be mounting by the day.

Fittingly, on the eve of the film’s release, LaBeouf was arrested for disorderly conduct during a Broadway show.

Though LaBeouf is missing, disorder appears to be the modus operandi of director Bay, seeing how he loves to blow things up with wild abandon.

The franchise has turned into a surfeit of CGI-generated explosions and an orgy of destruction of everything in the path of giant robots.

The whole volatile premise is so overworked that the incessant clash of robots and the crunching of metal are just too much for anyone with a pulse to endure.

This is the type of mindless, idiotic nonsense that not only dulls the mind but causes one to lose brain cells.

Okay, so LaBeouf is out, and so is Megan Fox. At least on the distaff side, Bay finds another hottie in Nicola Peltz’s Tessa Yeager, a high school senior who favors very brief shorts and whose single father Cade (Mark Wahlberg) is a besieged inventor of robots working out of a barn on his rural Texas homestead.

Struggling to keep his property from being foreclosed, Cade is unable to resist buying an old semi truck rusting inside an abandoned theatre. Carefully restoring the vehicle, with the help of his friend Lucas (T.J. Miller), Cade discovers that he has unearthed Optimus Prime.

For the uninitiated, Optimus Prime is the leader of the Autobots, the good aliens who helped the human race to fight off the Decepticons, the aliens whose only goal is apparently to rid our entire planet of any human existence.

In any case, if you don’t know the difference between an Autobot and a Decepticon, this would be the moment to forget any thought of seeing this movie and perhaps consider catching an indie film that likely no more than a few dozen will ever watch. Better yet, just stay at home.

Meanwhile, creepy CIA honcho Harold Attinger (Kelsey Grammer), assisted by his even creepier henchman Jases Savoy (Titus Welliver), has teamed up with a Decepticon named Lock Down to hunt down the Autobots, looking for spare parts that can be sold to a sleazy industrialist.

The film’s most interesting character is Stanley Tucci’s Joshua Joyce, CEO of Kinetic Sciences Institute, an industrial plant that is trying to replicate the giant alien robots, ostensibly for more benevolent purposes, but likely not, considering the shadowy figures lurking about.

One reason that Tucci’s Joshua is fascinating is that he has the best lines, mostly ones that provide comic relief to a story that becomes increasingly dull. To his credit, Tucci can come across as both pompous and ridiculous.

On the other hand, Wahlberg’s Cade has little to do other than to be an overprotective father. Boy, he gets a rude awakening when he meets her secret Irish boyfriend Shane (Jack Reynor), a more worldly character but one who proves handy for his race car driving skills.

The best car chase sequence comes fairly early when the Yeagar family, with Shane driving his sporty car, eludes the elite, deadly CIA commando squad that swoops down on the Texas ranch like the assault on the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas.

The Yeagers and Shane end up in Chicago, which was pretty much annihilated in the last “Transformers” movie. The search is for Optimus Prime’s fellow Autobots, and again destruction follows. Hasn’t Chicago suffered enough from Michael Bay and the fact that Cubs haven’t won a World Series in more than a century?

At Joshua’s KSI complex, faceless scientists in white lab coats are busy creating a robot named Galvatron, and when Optimus Prime and his fellow bots show up, chaos and mayhem rule the day.

The scene shifts to China and Hong Kong (I already lost track of the transition), and more bedlam and disorder become the norm as robots engage in more destruction. At this point, one must stifle the inevitable yawns as the dull action becomes more repetitive.

“Transformers: Age of Extinction” is aimed at slack-jawed adolescents that spend all of their free time (or is it all the time?) watching violent video games or playing pinball machines in an arcade.

Unfortunately for the vestiges of intelligent life that still remain, there are more “Transformer” movies to come, and I can only hope that I may be on an extended overseas vacation at the time, sparing myself the agony of losing three hours of my life that are forever lost.

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

COBB, Calif. – The Cobb Mountain Artists group will host its open studio tour on Saturday, July 12, and Sunday, July 13.

It will be held from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. both days.

Artists and craftspeople will offer the public the opportunity to “go behind the scenes” to visit the places in which they create.

This year's tour includes returning and new artisans with a wide range of media: ceramics – from functional to custom tiles – paintings, felting, jewelry, photography, glass, woodworking and much more.

Maps with directions easing you from studio to studio will be available at Mountain High Coffee, in Cobb and Hidden Valley Lake; Grinders Steep, Middletown; Loch Lomond Store, Loch Lomond; on the Web site, www.cobbmtnartists.org ; and at individual studios on event days.

For more information contact Joanne Sharon at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or 707-987-8827.

I’m especially fond of sparklers because they were among the very few fireworks we could obtain in Iowa when I was a boy.

And also because in 2004 we set off the fire alarm system at the Willard Hotel in Washington by lighting a few to celebrate my inauguration as poet laureate.

Here’s Barbara Crooker, of Pennsylvania, also looking back.

Sparklers

We’re writing our names with sizzles of light
to celebrate the fourth. I use the loops of cursive,
make a big B like the sloping hills on the west side
of the lake. The rest, little a, r, one small b,
spit and fizz as they scratch the night. On the side
of the shack where we bought them, a handmade sign:
Trailer Full of Sparkles Ahead, and I imagine crazy
chrysanthemums, wheels of fire, glitter bouncing
off metal walls. Here, we keep tracing in tiny
pyrotechnics the letters we were given at birth,
branding them on the air. And though my mother’s
name has been erased now, I write it, too:
a big swooping I, a hissing s, an a that sighs
like her last breath, and then I ring
belle, belle, belle in the sulphuric smoky dark.

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 2013 by Barbara Crooker from her most recent book of poems, Gold, Cascade Books, 2013. Poem reprinted by permission of Barbara Crooker and the publisher. Introduction copyright 2014 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.