Arts DEVOté

“Crying like a two-dollar whore.”

With a constant drizzle on his shoulder, a little extra scratch in his pocket and good friend/adventure buddy at his side, Arts DEVOté was washed clean last week.

It all started with a three-hour date with David Lynch’s latest, Inland Empire, at the gorgeous Castro Theatre. The slippery consciousness of the film seeped into A.D.’s pores and ended up coloring his two-plus days away. It was disorientating (and rejuvenating) to leave town and immediately replace my routine with a succession of Lynch, cocktails and giant Hentai at the Porn Palace, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (“Narkissos” by Jess is insane!), the ’zine rack at City Lights Books, café at Caffe Trieste, corned beef at Ireland Bank, underground theater on the edge of the Tenderloin, an Old Fashioned at Original Joe’s and Elvis vinyl at Amoeba Records in Berkeley.

God is a killer whale Chico done good again.

Travel buddy Mark Lore and I were steered during our adventure to a showing of Serve by Expiration by our amazing East Bay hosts Bryce Allemann and Kathy Hicks, two of the founding members of the Thunderbird Theatre Company and two of the earliest and best humans A.D. ever met in Chico.

The former locals started the company eight years ago with other Chico ex-pats and have made a name for themselves in the city’s bustling underground theater scene.

Our Thunderbird experience (showing at Exit Stage Left through Sat., Feb. 24) was an irreverent night of original sketches featuring instant pasta-maker cults, sexually abused kitty cats, a killer-whale-as-god and a collection of animated shorts, including Hollow Kitty, a gothy spoof of a certain blank-faced feline. Bravo!

Stranded on Turtle Island Speaking of City Lights,Gary Snyder (pictured in foreground with his pal Allen Ginsberg), one of the seminal writers of the San Francisco Renaissance from which the bookstore was born, is coming to speak at Chico State Fri., March 2, as part of the university’s On the Creek lecture series.

Snyder won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1975 for his Turtle Island collection, but before that he was part of the West Coast contingent of the Beat Movement, and was even one of the handful of writers on the bill at San Francisco’s Six Gallery in 1955 when Allen Ginsberg infamously debuted his Howl. Known for bringing themes of nature and Eastern spirituality to the Beat canon (Jack Kerouac’s Japhy Ryder character in Dharma Bums was modeled after Snyder), Snyder comes to Chico to talk about both themes and his new book of essays, Back on the Fire . The talk is free. Just contact the University Box Office to reserve tickets: (530) 898-6333.

Bi-weekly Devotions:

• Mini-grants: Only a couple days left (deadline 5 p.m., Fri., Feb. 23) for artists to turn in applications for the city of Chico’s mini-grant program. Grants from $500 to $2,000 are up for grabs. Info: (530) 894-4357.

• Buz-Fest: It’s an honest-to-god film fest! The Paradise Youth Council is presenting its second annual Buz-Fest, a program of locally grown short films by student filmmakers (25 and younger), Fri, Feb. 23, at Feather River Cinemas. www.myspace.com/buzfest.

• Art 1st Saturday: Don’t just talk it, walk it. Follow the map (see next week’s CN&R) and buy some original art, Sat., March 3.