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…
Posts published in “Essays”
(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…
I have been living in San Francisco for three years, and, while I want to love it, I encounter hurdles at every turn that inhibit my wanna-be romance. I have a hard time getting beyond…
It is not until the last of the eight episodes of Ripley, which dropped in April on Netflix, that Bach’s music makes an appearance. I’d been expecting it, and not just any piece from among…