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Posts published in “Essays”

Last Of The Ink-Stained Wretches

Journalism, once a noble calling, is now an embarrassment; reporters have reputations worse than used car salesmen. I did newspaper work 35 years, then morphed into a private investigator. Asked about my former career I…

Retro Frisco, Retro Mankind

To call it “Frisco” is in and out itself a retro act of defiance. I don’t know anyone today who calls it Frisco, though Jack Kerouac, Mr. On The Road, did decades ago. Go to…

Island Of No Women

After a while it was like being in jail. After a while you quit thinking about having a beer because no matter what, the ice chest is empty, the taps are dry and the guards…

Cap’n Rainbow, Roots & Ancestry

Very early in these Anderson Valley stories and reminiscences, I wrote a couple of articles on the subject “what is a hippie anyway?,” which described a broad spectrum of personalities and careers in our community.…

Sounds Of San Francisco

What are the sounds of San Francisco? Music of all sorts of course and especially rock ‘n’ roll in concert halls, under the stars and on street corners. As the Starship once sang, “we built…

A Dog’s Age

Buster Keaton's 1923 silent film The Three Ages — a send-up of D.W. Griffith's epic Intolerance, the grandaddy of all message films — ends on a visionary note. Like its satirical target, The Three Ages…

And The Horse He Rode In On

(Research & fact-checking by Tommy Wayne Kramer) Bruce Anderson owned and edited the Anderson Valley Advertiser for more than 40 years; going forward the newspaper will be online only. He recently met for an interview…

Collage or Perish

ATTENTION Almost everything we do, or I do, after basic human needs, is looking striving hoping for attention. Anything I write is looking for someone to read it. I get very little attention from what…

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