To call it “Frisco” is in and out itself a retro act of defiance. I don’t know anyone today who calls it Frisco, though Jack Kerouac, Mr. On The Road, did decades ago. Go to…
Posts published in “Essays”
After a while it was like being in jail. After a while you quit thinking about having a beer because no matter what, the ice chest is empty, the taps are dry and the guards…
Very early in these Anderson Valley stories and reminiscences, I wrote a couple of articles on the subject “what is a hippie anyway?,” which described a broad spectrum of personalities and careers in our community.…
What are the sounds of San Francisco? Music of all sorts of course and especially rock ‘n’ roll in concert halls, under the stars and on street corners. As the Starship once sang, “we built…
Buster Keaton's 1923 silent film The Three Ages — a send-up of D.W. Griffith's epic Intolerance, the grandaddy of all message films — ends on a visionary note. Like its satirical target, The Three Ages…
(Research & fact-checking by Tommy Wayne Kramer) Bruce Anderson owned and edited the Anderson Valley Advertiser for more than 40 years; going forward the newspaper will be online only. He recently met for an interview…
ATTENTION Almost everything we do, or I do, after basic human needs, is looking striving hoping for attention. Anything I write is looking for someone to read it. I get very little attention from what…
Charles Lindbergh’s family name was really Mansson. Lindbergh’s grandfather, a dour Swede with a luxuriant beard and fire-and-brimstone countenance, changed it to Lindbergh when he came to America in 1859 in circumstances that were both…
Johann Sebastian Bach’s last pupil, Johann Gottfried Müthel (1728–88) spent the final two decades of his life as a church organist in the Baltic city of Riga, far to the northeast of the three central…