Slim, bespectacled Jean Jacques Brun was pouring a modernly designed 2009 Brun Avril magnum that was cork tainted — i.e. smelled of bleach. I was his first taster of the afternoon and he eyeballed my…
Posts tagged as “essays”
“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” That line from John Ford’s film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance proves apt for tales of the Old West time and again. The shootout between feuding…
“Humor is just another defense against the universe.” — Mel Brooks Once upon a time, so many years ago it might have been another lifetime, I got two kittens, a boy and girl, and after…
It took until March for a smattering of steelhead to run up flat-bottomed Gibson Creek, a watercourse that flows past the house where I live, in a fastidiously well-manicured section of West Side Ukiah (water-intensive…
“Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.” — Blaise Pascal Marcia and I watched the movie…
Two things are remarkable about the last 35,000 years of human history: that things have remained so stable, and that so much has changed. If, as Pablo Picasso is said to have remarked, we have…
In 1976 The Band staged a farewell-to-the-road concert, “The Last Waltz,” at Winterland in San Francisco. Levon Helm, Robbie Robertson, Richard Manuel, Rick Danko and Garth Hudson played a dozen of their own great songs…
Hippie met its ugly death In Buena Vista Park; Buried with the smack and meth With candles in the dark; Vietnam the only trip That had the people in its grip. * * * Organized…