Being a very fortunate guy, I’ve lived within sight of the California Coast my entire life. I’ve also been a reader and collector of books about and/or set in this fabled zone, and one of the greatest of all of them is being rereleased in a beautiful new paperback edition, after selling out in hardcover […]
Way back in high school I somehow got the wild idea to ride a bicycle down the entire West Coast, from the Canadian to Mexican borders. Well why not? Summer was coming, I was all of 17 years old, born and raised on the Orange County Coast, with a yearning to see broader vistas. I […]
Just last year I attended a dramatic reading of ancient texts about mortality. What fun, right? But it drew a full house of over 1,000 people to San Francisco’s ornate Castro Theatre. It also left many of us in the audience on the brink of tears. I watched with a sense of wonder both at […]
The fabled Reggae on the River festival has been through more trials and tribulations than your average 30-something native Californian, with a real rough patch in recent years due to disorganization, in-fighting, and financial struggles. The result has been an extended identity crisis. But considering some near-death experiences over the past decade or so, the […]
Way back in the early 1970s I stumbled upon a then-new record titled “Blue Moses” by pianist Randy Weston. It had a very colorful, almost psychedelic cover and a roster of top jazz stars like Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Hubert Laws on flute, drummer Billy Cobham, Miles Davis’s bassist Ron Carter. and more, and looked […]
Standing on stage in front of thousands of people can be a kind of out-of-body experience, especially if one is essentially shy in public. But on the big stage at the Sierra Nevada World Music Festival, it mostly feels easy — the crowd is so positively happy and supportive that it can feel like one […]
This year marks the 25th annual version of the Sierra Nevada World Music Festival, and its 13th year in Boonville. Begun in 1994 in the foothills of the mountain range it’s named for, the organizers felt compelled by lack of local support and a predatory criminal element to move to another site in the mountains […]
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 oat scone and cup down with my newspapers and sat. Before I got a good gulp down a guy sat […]
The Sierra Nevada World Music Festival (SNWMF) relocated to Boonville in 2006, after operating in the Sierra foothills since 1994, making this the 12th year here. After some challenges with an extreme heatwave and then extreme fires in the first couple years, it’s been pretty much smooth sailing since, albeit with some adjustments to volume and such. Any notable changes planned for this year?
For a time I provided ‘drug education’ in public and private schools. As an outsider consultant, this was often tacit recognition that nobody on staff could or wanted to do it, and that the students were unlikely to listen to them anyway. Whether many of them actually listened to me was uncertain, but I tried. […]
Let’s talk about vaccines for a bit — even though doing so in public forums always risks going down a rabbit hole of anti-science, conspiracy theories, and endless random nuttiness.