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Posts published in “Essays”

If You Really Loved Me, You’d Die For Me

Love, it has been said, is a many-splendored thing. By Andy Williams and Han Suyin, anyway, who, respectively, sang the song and wrote the book that became the 1955 feature film.  How exactly you splendor…

Carving the Coast

Being a very fortunate guy, I’ve lived within sight of the California Coast my entire life. I’ve also been a reader and collector of books about and/or set in this fabled zone, and one of…

Local Boy Makes Good

Growing up in Marin County, Bill Kimberlin remembers his mother taking him to visit the set of “Blood Alley,” a 1955 Cold War adventure set in China starring John Wayne and Lauren Bacall, back in…

Caspar Historical Curiosities

As AVA readers have interest in Mendocino County history beyond the Anderson Valley the following is offered. It’s easy to be researching one project and get waylaid by interesting materials that have nothing to do…

Corona Music

Spring has been slow to come to Upstate New York. There have been snow flurries in April, and the yearned-for arrival of green in the landscape has been halting. Like the humans, the leaves seem…

A Tale of Two Viruses

The lesson of COVID-19 is that nature demands respect. If we continue trying to dominate and commodify nature, we will pay dearly. “Rampant deforestation, uncontrolled expansion of agriculture, intensive farming, mining and infrastructure development, as…

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