In Wes Anderson’s latest film, Asteroid City, the writer-director manages the unlikely feat of producing a vision that is simultaneously pre- and post-apocalyptic. In an Eisenhower-era Los-Alamos-meets-Area-51-meets-proto-Las-Vegas desert outpost the threat of nuclear annihilation literally…
Posts published in “Essays”
I know the venue and I know the crowd; I’ve played this house before. They anticipate my arrival and I sense a change in the gallery, an electric charge in the air. I step from…
Always looking for things to write about, it came to me that it would be a good idea to ask others what they loved about Anderson Valley. Unfortunately I told people the deadline for responding…
“Everyone always has the fanciest reasons for what they do.” –Lillian Hellman The headline atop the Times sports page June 21 was a sanctimonious lie: “In Homage to Mays and the Negro Leagues, MLB Heads…
“Vladimir Putin is clearly losing the War in Iraq.” — “Joe Biden,” US President Russian Revolution Two kicked off the long, hot summer freak show of 2023. Unlike Russian Revolution One (1917), which lasted over…
In late May, the pro-Kremlin political PR hack Konstantin Dolgov published a startling interview with Yevgeny Prigozhin, the commander of the Wagner private military company. Prigozhin said that the entire “denazification and demilitarisation” rationale behind…
Flying Oakland to Burbank meant saving a couple hundred bucks. So headquarters could spring for a cab, instead of the Muni/BART/shuttle journey. A Georgian — not the Atlanta kind — arrived to haul me across…
by Fremont Older, Editor of the San Francisco Call Bulletin, 1931 It happened at the moment of my deepest depression that A.E. Sherwood, my stepfather's brother, suggested to me that I could preempt 160 acres…