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.
Posts published by “Steve Heilig”
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.…
Can you imagine your young kids setting off to see the world, with no real plans, little money, and no phone or internet access? “See you in a few months or years, I dunno"? Today's…
San Francisco has been oft-referred to as “49 square miles, surrounded by reality.” And the fabled Haight-Ashbury district is oft-noted as the most unreal square mile therein. Every April 20th — “4/20” — it becomes…