Unionville, Connecticut was the other side of the tracks - the sleazy, working-class end of Farmington, so disreputable it had to have a different name, lest Farmington proper be embarrassed. And it wasn't just a…
Posts published in “Essays”
I saw grizzlies in Yellowstone in October. About as close as you can come to going back to native worship. I stopped again at Little Bighorn on the way back home. About as close as…
One-Twenty-Eight. The highway. That $%&(@! road. However one refers to California State Highway 128, it is Anderson Valley’s main street and its main portal to the outside world. Highway 128 is also — in some…
My son and I argue movies all the time. He thinks that the Academy and other film industry prizes are well deserved while I can’t recall a Golden Globe or Oscar for a movie I…
Self-published novels don’t have to be self-indulgent. Bryan Radzin’s one and only self-published novel describes the cross continental adventures of a young, idealistic California journalist who unearths a global conspiracy with the help of his…
Research Rapture? It’s what happens when a history mystery is handed to your historian correspondent and time and resources allow hours of delving into facts and figures. I was given a typewritten list of 114…
When it comes to areas of the world being racked by drought, one of the few that has had at least as hard a time as California is central and southern Brazil. Whereas the US's…
It’s commonly believed that more than 20,000 people are buried under Washington Square Park, used as a cemetery and home to freed slaves in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The baroque density of Thomas Pynchon’s novels for half-a-century has dissuaded filmmakers from trying to turn any of them into movies. Paul Thomas Anderson’s valiant—or perhaps just plain crazy—cinematic confrontation with Inherent Vice is the…