Determined to see another example of mural art by Ben Cunningham, the artist who painted the mural in the Ukiah Post Office, I trekked to Coit Tower in San Francisco. There, my Internet research assured me, was another example of Ben’s art, a mural entitled “Outdoor Life.” No mention of the fact on the Internet that [...]
by Todd Walton
Cliff Glover recently gave us one of his bowls. Cliff is an excellent potter and a superb cook. Tall, and possessed of a magnificent froth of silver gray hair, Cliff and his partner Marion Miller share a house and ceramic studio a couple miles inland from the hamlet of Albion. Marcia and I met Cliff [...]
Jews harps, kazoos, and accordions. The county’s biggest oak dance floor and the world’s smallest cow. A Medicare-eligible woman hanging upside down from the ceiling and pre-pubescent divas with broken hearts. Bearded ballerinas. A show that began with a trunk full of ancient magic and closed underwater, steam punk style, this annual confluence of talent, [...]
Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, which will doubt-less figure prominently in the Academy Awards nominations to be issued next week, is a horror flick en pointe: terrifyingly claustrophobic, often painful, massively melodramatic, and ultimately self-destructive. In other words, it’s a ballet movie. Go to any performance of Swan Lake, which Black Swan converts from Romantic tragedy [...]
by Katy Tahja
“Living Treasures” are those elders in a community recognized as having special knowledge, learned over a lifetime, that they share with others. These folks usually aren’t rich or college educated but they possess a mental encyclopedia that would put a computer to shame. In Mendocino County we have two “Living Treasures” in the persons of [...]
by John Wester
Hollywood produces frauds From lives that once had meat; No one in the know applauds Hollywood’s latest feat When it produces movies of Redemption. Triumph. Real love. * * * I like watching boxing like I like to watch football. But I always feel guilty because someone’s getting hurt. I watch to see power and [...]
For all its much-hyped and massively expensive high-tech stage machinery, the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Wagner’s Das Rheingold seems surprisingly underpowered, as if so much money and mental power went into the behemoth contraption dominating the stage throughout that not much was left over for the details of scenery, costume, and action. Subscribe now [...]
by Steve Heilig
“…the thousand-year sigh in Joanne Kyger’s genius!” — Ed Sanders, “Ode to the Beat Generation”, 2008 Specially For your eyes If you make it this far you are fairly out of danger because now you are on foot on dirt roads, edged with sunlight and small birds. When the wind comes up you inhale it [...]
There are few things worth giving up a perfect fall afternoon in Upstate New York for, but Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman with live music is one of them. A dinner break and a return for F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise, beginning as the sun sets on the other side of Lake Cayuga seals the sacrifice of those [...]
by Todd Walton
Books “Rae’s eyes were red and swollen. They sat on the couch side by side, in silence, waiting for the doctor.” from Crooked Little Heart by Anne Lamott The silence of the eyes rings true, and the eyes being side-by-side seems plausible, but how in heck did those eyes get onto that couch without Rae? [...]
