Mozart’s music is for everybody, from diaper-clad babies to mass-murdering dictators. That chilling truth launches the brutal slapstick satire—or do I mean hyper-realist romp?—of Armando Iannuci’s delightful and disturbing film, Death of Stalin. What we…
Posts published in “Essays”
Politically in Fort Bragg, the proverbial rubber is meeting a hot tar road. The big boxes are coming to Hare Creek. Georgia Pacific is running hard to disengage from the mill site cleanup. The Planning…
“I’m afraid that Napa is becoming the Valley of the Oligarchs. If it can happen here, where people are reasonably intelligent it can happen anywhere.” — St. Helena city councilman Geoff Ellsworth Where does one…
The Gowan name is known throughout our region for wonderful local apples and produce, so it does not come as a surprise that the history of Cecil and Alice (nee Studebaker) Gowan's family in Mendocino County is deep and rich. Both sets of Alice's grandparents moved to the Anderson Valley in the 1860's. Notably one of her grandfathers traded sixteen horses for his initial home property in Philo. Cecil's family moved to the Anderson Valley from Shelter Cove in 1902 when Cecil was 13.
I have always liked the "well-oiled machine" comparison, evoking as it does images of briskly humming gears, cogs, cams, and belts efficently spinning away and finely tooled components seating themselves with satisfying metallic clicks and…
I was born on tax day. But it was only on my 40th birthday (13 years ago) that my quick-witted friend David Borden—pioneering electronic music master, first tester of the Moog synthesizers and founder of…
Many readers have heard of H.H. (Harold Howard) Wonacott, the photographer who maintained studios in both Willits and Fort Bragg in the 1910s and on into the 1920s. In 1922 he sold the Willits studio…
A starkly political film from the north of Ireland was an unusual choice for this year's annual San Francisco Independent Film Festival, "Indie Fest"- held every February. The Fest screened the 2017 feature "Maze" which…
The headwaters of the South Fork of the Eel River have been continuously tainted by polluted seepage from the Laytonville landfill for 50 years. Preliminary results from a community health study currently underway suggest people…