It is not uncommon for those of us who have lived for over half a century to nostalgicize a Mom’s-apple-pie-in-the-sky America of the late Fifties and early Sixties that was kinder and gentler than it is today. Which just goes to show the truly corrosive effect of time on memory, or perhaps it’s just a [...]
by Steve Sparks
The new season opened last Friday evening with a return match against Drew High School of San Francisco who had visited Boonville this time last year when the home team Panthers managed to secure a narrow 3-2 victory. The team and coaches set off in two school vans at 2.30pm and had a fairly smooth [...]
by Bruce McEwen
The Golden Old-time Music Camp-Out came to Boonville last weekend for the second time. It used to be in Yreka, way up north. This is the second music festival to relocate to Boonville in the last few years, the first being the Sierra Nevada World Music Festival, not that Sierra Nevada and the Golden Oldies [...]
Before I Am Love, directed by Luca Gaudagnino and released into American movie theaters this summer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer John Adams had never written a soundtrack. In a way he still hasn’t, since more than 30 minutes of music he supplied for this Italian soap opera without the suds were cannibalized in one [...]
As more people discover how to send text messages on their ever-present cell phones, we have become a nation of hypnotized zombies who stare into our phones while we drive into telephone poles, walk into trees, wander into fellow pedestrians, jam up traffic in the cereal aisle and generally tune out to what is going [...]
by Bill Hatch
1949, the spotlight illuminated the most fantastic event I had ever seen in my six years of life: Casey Tibbs winning the saddle-bronc rider championship of the world in eight seconds. Since then, my heroes have always included “high-ridin’ cowboys,” as Willie Nelson put it. The crowd held its breath during that ride and was [...]
by R.G. Davis
Comments on the Oliver Stone film “South of the Border” accompanied by a Carmen Miranda tune, at Berkley’s Elmwood Theatre, July 17, 2011, with economist and scriptwriter Mark Weisbrot (with Tariq Ali-in the film) fielding questions. The film originated when Oliver Stone decided to interview Hugo Chavez to counter the general distortions in the US [...]
Studio Odd Hours, which you may or may not remember, has ceased to exist. For those of you who did not know of the “intelligent, New American Art” displayed in downtown Fort Bragg, or who refused climbing the flight of stairs leading to the second-story exhibition room on First Fridays: shame on you. The norm-bending [...]
by Bruce McEwen
Lauren’s Restaurant should be packed to the rafters this Saturday night when Nahara, Boonville’s fledgling songbird and healing arts masseuse, takes the stage for her first live performance as a professional singer. Nahara has performed before, both at the Varity Show and she had a solo role in the recent production of Dearly Departed by [...]
by Todd Walton
“Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure.” — Christopher Lasch A few weeks before my second novel was to be published in 1980, I got a call from my editor at Simon & Schuster saying that Sales had decided my title wasn’t strong enough [...]
