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Posts tagged as “essays”

High On Lodi

I've got a friend Chris who's a skydiver. A legitimate one. He goes skydiving every Sunday in Lodi/Acampo at the Parachute Center. I've got a little experience in the sky. Way back in my New…

Lost & Found At Burning Man

While many writers take to print and electronic media to pooh-pooh Burning Man with pronouncements about false values and carbon footprints and financing I personally question whether they have ever actually attended the event.

Keith Jarrett In The Landscape Of Bach

No keyboard player of this or any other age has been more wide-ranging than Keith Jarrett. His contributions to jazz extend from the endlessly astonishing treatment of standards to expansive and spontaneous explorations of the…

Down To Downieville

We’re fortunate to live here in a place called Big Valley in the northeast corner of California on the Lassen/Modoc County line that has so far managed to avoid overpopulation and overdevelopment and the resultant hyper lifestyle that gives sad valid relevance to the contemporary epithet Californicated.

The Way Of Things

My brother sent me a fascinating article published recently in New Scientist that warns of the impending loss of a gigantic part of our recent cultural heritage. To quote from the article: “Magnetic tape begins to degrade chemically in anything from a few years to a few decades, depending on its precise composition.”

Borne Arms & Bare Behinds

Whistling down the Amtrak line in the region of Fernley, Nevada, about five in the afternoon, in the observation car under a lid of smoke from Sierra Nevada fires, scanning the murky sagebrush hills for…

Why Do We Need Homes?

I went to Berkeley’s first task force on homelessness the other night. It answered a few questions for me, but it also raised a lot more. Chief among them, I guess, is what is the…

Beautiful Noize

The summer road trip seems to offer the chance to catch up on all those recordings accumulated over the previous year. Depending on your perspective, the endless government pork ladled out onto the highways of…

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