Consider “Over the Rainbow.” Light, fragile, wistful, brimming with yearning and hope, young Dorothy sings about what she knows: Birds, trees, lemon drops and rainbows. Listeners know the same from our own fragmented memories. Judy…
Posts published in “Essays”
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…
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…