For all their breathtaking immensity, dams are oddly vulnerable things—a vulnerability that is shared and greatly intensified among the millions of people who depend on them. The engineers who have built them have gone to…
Posts published in “Essays”
I was peacefully sipping my second cup of coffee and cycling through the morning’s newspapers back in the day when my 16-year-old daughter strode into the kitchen and plopped herself down across from me at…
Wayne McGimsey takes a quick but wistful look out the large picture window of his Boonville house, strategically located between Anderson Valley Market and Lauren’s Restaurant, before he begins to talk about times past. If…
When you drive into the Owens Valley from the south, on your left to the west is the most magnificent mountain range in the Sierra Nevada. Majestic Mt. Whitney, tallest peak in the continental United…
Cadillac, “American Standard for the World,” may be making a mistake in its slick and glossy magazine ads. In the foreground we see the latest 1975 model looking for all the world, give or take…
Saturday, July 8 — It was “Hello Kitty” day at the bayfront ballpark. The meaning of that seemed unclear to most attendees other than some very cute little kids with cat ears on. It was a…
Consider “Over the Rainbow.” Light, fragile, wistful, brimming with yearning and hope, young Dorothy sings about what she knows: Birds, trees, lemon drops and rainbows. Listeners know the same from our own fragmented memories. Judy…
In Wes Anderson’s latest film, Asteroid City, the writer-director manages the unlikely feat of producing a vision that is simultaneously pre- and post-apocalyptic. In an Eisenhower-era Los-Alamos-meets-Area-51-meets-proto-Las-Vegas desert outpost the threat of nuclear annihilation literally…
I know the venue and I know the crowd; I’ve played this house before. They anticipate my arrival and I sense a change in the gallery, an electric charge in the air. I step from…