A PLAY IN ONE ACT Cast of Characters: DAVE EYSTER, Mendocino County District Attorney BUNNY, Dave’s invisible childhood friend BUNNY: Dave? Dave? Dave it’s me. Dave! Dave wake up! DAVE: Huh? Whaa? Dave’s not here.…
Posts published in “Essays”
In America, everything is possible, even Mission Impossible. Especially Mission Impossible. The theme music proclaims it. Bursting out of a high tremolo like a fuse burning fast, the opening trombone-heavy groove is jaunty yet resolute.…
Is every town overrun with golfers the way Ukiah is? Is there any other group that seems to be everywhere all at once the way local golfers are? If there isn’t a weekend golf tournament…
Reflections on Thorne Dreyer’s Notes from the Underground (New Journalism Project, $27). Have you noticed? Sixties folk—organizers, activists, pacifists, feminists and liberationists of all stripes—can’t seem to get enough of the era when they made…
Slightly condensed from an article in the March 1949 American Legion Magazine by Paul Gardner (my dad, whose folder of yellowed clippings I’ve been looking through.) In mid-summer of 1946 Bill Veeck limped into Cleveland…
Alexander Cockburn, the most incisive political journalist of our time, was born on June 6, 1941 (the year of the snake). I sent him this in ‘91: Greetings to our favorite lefty, Alexander Cockburn, 50…
I began hearing about Hop Flat, the short-lived logging and millcamp west of the rocky bluff at Highway 128’s milepost 5.50, when I first moved to The Valley in 1971. The old Navarro woodsman bachelor…
There was no such thing as “semitism” when Wilhelm Marr, a German journalist/political organizer, coined the term “antisemitism” to mean prejudice against Jews. When Marr founded “The Anti-Semitic League” in 1879, why didn't he use…