Dear Dr. Zack, Please help me, as I am about to lose my mind, or what’s left of it. For the past few years, instead of people saying “First of all … Secondly, thirdly, fourthly … Lastly,” they have been saying “First of all, Second of all, Third of all,” etc., and even Senator Bernie [...]
When I got the news I was in Paris, sitting in the silver rain outside Notre Dame. We were filming a street performer dressed in flowing red robes and on stilts. Sort of like you, Charles: a giant from another world — out of place, intimidating perhaps, but as lyrical as a strange bird. This [...]
There is a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco a few blocks from my parents’ house. The Garden is indistinguishable from dozens of other Chinese restaurants in Beijing-By-The-Bay: harsh fluorescent lights, black metal chairs that look like they were stolen from a VFW Hall in Fresno, a pair of grubby tanks in which lobsters and fish await the executioner’s pot. A place where rock cod and appetites come to die.
The famous and also infamous director Werner Herzog is giving seminars for aspiring filmmakers (which the Rand Corp. pegs at 75% of the U.S. popu lation). Included in the curriculum is: “…the art of lockpicking. Traveling on foot. The exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully. The athletic side of filmmaking. The creation of your own [...]
Dear Cloverdale Road, I won’t say it’s been too long, but even now my feelings are mixed. Over the years our relationship has been complicated, happy, tumultuous. With you I have endured banality, adventure and farce; and like all great love stories, you have left your mark. At times my heart leapt at the sight [...]
Part of my daily exercise ritual, aside from watching TV and spying on the neighbors, is to hurl myself up and down a steep hill overlooking San Francisco Bay. The majority of my days are spent alone inside; for an hour a day I can be alone outside. Sometimes it makes all the difference. Subscribe [...]
