Somebody actually told me recently to "think outside the box." Please. If this phrase ever had any meaning at all it's become obscured in a fog of overuse and irony. To me, the expression stinks…
Posts published in “Essays”
My father was an anarchist and didn't know it. When the Connecticut State Police first made the announcement that "driving is not a right, it is a privilege" sometime around 1960, he fumed and grumbled. …
Last night we watched a DVD of the new movie People, Places, Things. The film did not have a theatrical release, which is the fate of most movies made in America these days unless they are massively expensive blockbusters. People, Places, Things is not a blockbuster and probably didn’t cost much to make, and Marcia and I both very much enjoyed the movie.
Sometimes it’s good to get out of the Valley and see a thing or two. My Mom Muriel Ellis decided to go to a writer’s conference at the Shattuck Hotel in Berkeley. I suggested that…
Remember the War in Vietnam? Indeed, how could anyone forget napalm, tiger cages and the Ho Chi Minh Trail, or the rag-tail army of pacifists, GIs, hippies, self-styled revolutionaries, Catholics, Buddhists, rock bands, and just…
California Governor Jerry Brown has signed into law the nation's most stringent restrictions on the use of antibiotics in the production of meat. Is this a good thing? It certainly is - perhaps a crucial step in our survival, in fact - and I am not prone to exaggeration of such things. Now our state's new policy must become that of the entire nation.
Just back from Ashland, Oregon, where I saw two plays. The good news: fifty to sixty high school students in attendance at Much Ado About Nothing. The bad news: average age of audience goers one…
It was a beautiful sunny day on the beach in Cardiff-by-Sea, Ca. during the early 1970’s, when I ran into this tall, friendly guy in a weird converted school bus. Now there’s a hippie dude…