Issues / 2001 / Jan 04
A depraved quiz night exposes the warped genius of the common people.
831--Tales from the area code It''s 7:30 on a Tuesday night at the Mucky Duck and the weekly quiz contest begins in half an hour. The teams are preparing themselves for yet another gambit of ...
Prophets In Their Own Time
In addition to being artists who worked for social change, there's another similarity shared by John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie: They both had a tough time being accepted by their hometowns. Just as Steinbeck was ...
Letters
For the Animals Anne Muraski's letter, "Animals are People, Too" (12/21-27), hit the mark with regard to criticizing "Boomer the Critter Man" (12/14-20) and informing citizens on their options in dealing with urban wildlife neighbors. ...
Streetalk.
People who know each other are bound to flip one another some guff now and then. Practical jokes are an American pasttime and are ingrained in our psyche as a way of showing affection. But ...
Welcome to Professor Birk's classroom. Today's topic: Karaoke.
Pronounce it however you want, "karaoke" still means "empty orchestra." (Linguists take note: The "kara" means empty--like "karate" or "empty hand"--and "oke" is a foreshortened version of "okeustra"--orchestra. Don''t you feel smart now?) Most...ahem...karaoke scholars...
Squid
From the Dept. of Gratuitous Faxes Squid returned from a week of overeating, watching TV and bickering with relations to discover that some very important events had transpired in my absence. Sifting through accumulated faxes, ...
All the Pretty Horses is just a pretty-good movie.
reviewThis much-storied and long-in-the-making film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy''s widely cherished Western novel is neither the sacrilege that McCarthy''s true believers feared nor the epiphany for which fans of the Western film genre had hoped. ...
Chip Hooper finds meaning at the juncture where reality and reflection meet.
There is no greater challenge for the contemporary landscape photographer than searching out fresh perspectives to express the beauty and mystery of the natural world. For Central Coast shooters in particular, the shadows cast by ...
Art movies are getting scarce around here. What gives?
Before there was a Dream, there was Cinema 812. Before that, there was the Steinbeck. Before that, there was the Golden Bough. And before that, there was the Hill. For nearly 50 years, art films ...
In which the reader is begged to avoid fruits and vegetables grown outside his or her own space/time continuum.
Once upon a time, there was a big war. After it was over, many new things were available to people all over the United States. Thanks to innovations designed to support the war effort, suddenly ...
Matching extraordinary wines with ordinary budgets.
Wine needn''t be expensive to deliver pleasure. And the idea of selecting one should not make your palms sweat. I recently observed two people in Trader Joe''s who ended up buying no wine because they ...
Artifacts
Born to Be Mild Everybody's favorite RVer, Brad Herzog is out and about pitching PR again for his book, States of Mind, a nonfiction travelogue about his 11-month, 48-state journey across the USA. He'll appear ...
The county's new planning director hopes to restore balance to the county with a potent smarth-growth solution.
What''s an environmentalist to do with Scott Hennessy? On one hand, the fact that he was chosen to oversee development as the new planning director for Monterey County spells good news for nature. As the ...
The Simple Complex
"This Land is Your Land: The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie," the Smithsonian Institution's traveling exhibit that opens next week at the National Steinbeck Center, may offer as intimate and honest a look at ...
Woody Guthrie's hard road from Dust Bowl vagabond to cultural icon.
The images are as romantic as they are disquieting: broken-down jalopies filled with gaunt-faced families and shabby furniture, hollow-eyed men looking for work, mournful women in sack-cloth dresses sitting on the porches of run-down houses. ...
I Cantori finishes the holiday season with a fluorish.
classical Commonly, holiday and spring offerings by choirs that are composed of both amateur and professional singers deliver uneven results. Cheryl Anderson''s Cantiamo! Cabrillo performance last week at Carmel''s Church of the Wayfarer makes the ...
