It’s now over three and a half years since the earthquake-triggered nuclear disaster in Japan, and concerns regarding the impacts continue. In Japan itself, the impacts have been huge and disastrous indeed, depending on location…
Posts published by “Steve Heilig”
For almost a quarter century, Dennis McNally held a job that could be considered an ultimate dream or nightmare, depending on one’s perspective — he was the official publicist for the Grateful Dead. And while…
The Albion was on 16th Street in the Mission district, on the corner of an alley called, yes, Albion Street. This was when the Mission was a largely Latino, relatively inexpensive, hip (as opposed to "hipster", which is the opposite), and sometimes dangerous part of town. But it was really only risky if you were a jerk to some local vatos or tried to walk home or to your car drunk at 2am closing time, when the predators did come out for easy prey. Otherwise, it was just a cool neighborhood for almost every kind of person with the best food options in town, even if quite dirty in places.
Recently, there was a reunion of my high school class, a recurrent traditional all-American event I'd always ignored, but for whatever reasons the peer pressure to attend this time came on strong and at the last minute, against my intuition and convictions, I succumbed, bought a plane ticket south, and went. I half-expected frightening reminders of collective aging, puerile nostalgia, embarrassing alcohol-enabled displays of long-repressed urges, ego-fueled career one-upsmanship, excruciating "sharing" of family pictures, and a general outburst of collective regret and confusion.
Not so long ago, many American kids dreamed of becoming cowboys - but of course few really did. Teenager Elliot Charles Adnopoz of 1940s Brooklyn, however, made his dream come true, running away from home…
"I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. ....It is the use of paranoid modes of…
Saturday's closer Shaggy, a superstar dancehall reggae singer/toaster of the 1990s, was a controversial headliner from the start - months before the show, online comments like "Shaggy? LOL" appeared, with true, (older?) reggae fans wondering what he was doing as a headliner, if at the festival at all. His actual appearance did nothing to resolve the conflict. People jammed both the front of the stage, cheering, and the exits, jeering. Shaggy's oft-crude demeanor and language was not all that rude by dancehall standards but struck many as out-of-place and insulting.
The third weekend in June is upon us, and for the past decade in Boonville that means the Sierra Nevada World Music Festival kicks off in the fairgrounds Friday evening and runs through Sunday evening.…