I never met him, never even saw him, though my formative years in the Bay Area were inextricably entwined with Charles McCabe. McCabe didn’t occupy the celestial firmament claimed by fellow San Francisco Chronicle columnist…
Posts published in “Essays”
After clubs and concert halls shut down in March of 2020, the enterprising and exuberant pianist Emmet Cohen invited the cameras and microphones into his Harlem apartment for weekly Monday night jam sessions that brought—and…
With the 2022 major league baseball season barely begun, a starting player on a prominent team lost his job. Though not in itself unusual – professional teams make on-field adjustments all the time – the…
"It ain't new and it ain't Mexico," so says a popular bumper sticker. Everywhere we three traveled everything we saw was old, very old. Millions and millions of years old. It was an incredibly wonderful…
Your correspondent got invited to an “Eve-of-420” bash on April 19, 2016, at a club in San Rafael started by the Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead. At the bar I got into a conversation…
Wheat was one of the main crops raised in Anderson Valley by the first homesteaders. In 1864, John Gschwend built a waterwheel powered grist mill on Mill Creek and in 1881, Mr. Chapman built one…
In a tremendous win for Big PhARMA, the American Psychiatric Association has added “Prolonged Grief Disorder” to its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder —a list of conditions for which insurance companies reimburse doctors.…