It’s already mid-March. Spring is nearly here and pot farmers are itching to plant their cash crop and pray for good weather. Any day now, Doug Gardner expects to have, up and running, one of…
Posts published by “Jonah Raskin”
Paul Masson coined the slogan. Orson Welles repeated it dramatically in one of the most memorable ads ever in the world of viticulture: “We will sell no wine before its time.” No doubt about it,…
No culture in the Sun? In France not long ago, a French professor of literature wore a bemused expression when I told him that California was my home, though I was teaching American literature in…
“You say you want a revolution,” The Beatles sang in 1968, near the height of the cultural revolution in the U.S., when sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll and rebellion mingled and gave birth to a…
What is about Jews and marijuana? That’s what Richard Nixon asked H. R. (Bob) Halderman 50-years ago, on May 26, 1971 to be precise. The White House tapes recorded Nixon saying, “There’s a funny thing,…
Boonville, California, the town which provides a home for the Anderson Valley Advertiser — the newspaper you’re reading — has a population of about one thousand people. I know three of Boonville’s citizens: Bruce Anderson,…
They’re demonized and exploited, revered for their youth and reviled simply because they’re young. They are today’s teenagers, the post-millennials, who came of age during Trump’s nightmare presidency, the flowering of the Black Lives Matter…
The anarchist, pacifist poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whom I knew for forty years was shy and introverted, even while he was a public figure who wanted to be recognized and appreciated as an artist. We performed…
It was a Pat Benatar kind of day, a day when I knew I would say, at least once, “Hit me with your best shot.” I was scheduled for a vaccination, my first, and I…