THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO I pulled one of the dumbest stunts of my life: I started a band with a 14-year-old bassist who’d never played bass, a 12-year-old drummer who’d never played drums, and considerably older…
Posts published in “Essays”
I read with great interest Chris Calder’s two great articles back to back on Sheriff Kendall in the Anderson Valley Advertiser. What spiked my interest was that the Sheriff came to Santa Rosa when he…
Last January, before all hell broke loose, Seven Stories Press republished Upton Sinclair’s 891-page anthology, The Cry for Justice, subtitled An Anthology of Social Protest with the original introduction by Jack London and a new introduction by Chris…
Greetings from the epicenter. A capital of culture is a nice place to be, but not the capital of a virus—or so you would think. Yet it’s sometimes better to be in the middle of…
Sitting in the morning sun on the front porch of my house next to the Cascadilla Gorge in Ithaca, New York earlier this week, I listened to a cardinal singing to the accompaniment of the…
Berkeley, 13 April 2020 — It had to happen. And now it has. People, not statistics or anecdotes, have died. They’re people, caught up in the pandemic, who my family knew. One, in his early…
I'm pretty sure I've mentioned what follows here in this space before, and I hate to repeat myself, but it has particular relevance now. I'd hate to be one of those people who repeats a…