Ahh, those Anderson Valley mornings. At the Mosswood before things heated up it was calm and happy, the smiling lovely staff providing truly wonderful coffee, and there were open seats out front. I plunked my…
Posts tagged as “essays”
When I think of the Democratic Party these days, the image instantly comes to mind of little Linda Blair playing the demon-possessed child in the classic horror movie, The Exorcist (1973), most particularly the scene in which…
Monday morning I debated making a trip over the hill to the Ukiah valley where our watermelons and sweetcorn might be needing water. At the Mosswood Market in Boonville my girlfriend, Jetta (who is carrying…
Would you darken your complexion and walk in the shoes of a black man in America today? Probably not, especially with police shootings of unarmed black men, and not if you remember John Howard Griffin’s…
The entire French Resistance against the Nazis can be encapsulated in this film sequence: a man—a loner, standing and leaning on his bicycle, smokes a cigarette alongside of the railroad tracks. He carries a newspaper…
I’ve never been down an American coal mine, among the least safest in the world, though have plunged thousands of feet into the dark bowels of British pits in Yorkshire, Wales and Scotland, the world’s safest until they were closed by politicians and bean counters.
The longest John Coltrane solo available on recording is said to be the title track of One Down, One Up: Live at the Half Note made in the spring of 1965 in New York City. The saxophonist’s…
As a historian I’ve always been fascinated by shipwrecks, but not in the conventional manner. Yes, there is drama in the ship crashing on the rocks and the exciting rescue of the crew and passengers,…