Edmonton 1985-2014 Thirty Fabulous Festivals

This 40 Year Veteran Street Act Scuffing Up the First Audience of the Day Saturday morning 11:30 show was mine to do. Alan Plotkin using a telephoto lens from “World Headquarters” took this shot. He didn’t bring me much luck the day before and discretion being the better part of valor stood off so […]

The Truth of the Thing

“I asked Norman Mailer which of the other art forms he thought being a novelist was closest to. “Acting,” he said. Under the Influence, Andrew O’Hagen. April 27, 2013 Financial Times Following the River, Guided by the Light WHAT WE USE Most of us are familiar with the list of elements that the novelist utilizes […]

The Western Writer

I prepare for Australia. It is looming. Like all of us born in California my life is full and not one more thing may be added now. Still, I am unsettled from another clever interview with an author who grew up in Idaho and describes herself as a “western writer”. We may all say where […]

The Nevada Single-Leaf Pinion Pine Nut as Plot

The Nevada single-leaf pinion pine (pinus monophylla) produces a nut. If you’ve ever made pesto you will recall that most recipes call for the use of pine nuts. If you’ve ever gone to a grocery store to buy pine nuts you soon discover that they are expensive. Retail they sell for near thirty dollars a […]

Crying at Weddings

I cry at weddings. I don’t need to know the couple. I just find the whole thing so romantic. My mind begins to wander and I become overwhelmed. You know the sociologists are fretting over the differential emerging between various income groups and their likelihood that they will marry. More money is predictive of taking […]

Tender Mercies for Billionaires

Now we Darwinian types do prefer our coffee black and we’ll take our capitalism as wild and predatory as nature itself. Social stabilizers, rules to the road, well regulated markets are for softies. The era of abundance is over. I never got a crack at enjoying the thing while it was around. So what we […]

Liberace as Lightening Rod

I think it is obvious. Some things are transparent. You can see right through them. Some people behave in such a manner and some places are like that too. What you see is what you get. In Washington DC there exist walls and fences. There is the secret service. There are barricades to stop vehicles […]

You Talking to Me?

A Place to Fight For Not A Place to Come for a Fight Here is our nation’s best known asylum for the rhetorically ‘toxified practitioner’ of the fine art of heated speech. I walked the Presidential portraits at the National Gallery. Nobody was around so I spoke to them about our nations present moment, how Congress has […]

Factual Straightjackets

Do you shop at the local produce markets that pop up in your community? I do. I relate to the whole notion of how much it costs to transport food long distances. I heard that because food from the southern hemisphere swirls in the opposite direction of food in the northern hemisphere that there is […]

To Hell in a Handbasket By Do-Gooders

How mean and nasty are you? I’m well shy of criminal mean and nasty but then I’m not talking about crime, I mean more generally about disposition, the essential direction of your personality. I’ve seen perfectly rational individuals once they are inside the construct of a relationship find that they have a pretty short fuse. […]