Arts

Celebrating everything that makes it both wild and woodsy, Rio Dell gets its romp on this week with Wildwood Days. The five-day festival has everything from racing lawnmowers to mustering firefighters, with plenty of alliterative events in between. (Parade, poker, penny scramble.) And it might even be sunny. Maybe. Things get started on Wednesday, Aug. […]

  Somewhere on the long list of reasons why you chose to spend your life in Humboldt County is scrawled something that resembles “the fresh air.” Our mixture of salty Pacific breezes and damp, fresh redwood must are enough to draw tens of thousands of people-filled cars to our pristine beaches and forests each year. […]

Between the Barclays Bank/LIBOR rate-rigging affair and the HSBC money-laundering scandal, the banking industry and bankers in general have been facing some bad press of late. So it’s no surprise that the always-topical (never silent) San Francisco Mime Troupe features crooked bankers in its latest musical, For the Greater Good or The Last Election. The […]

  “Humboldt” and “green” are as synonymous as “Canada” and “white.” Our forests are lush and glorious, we famously elected the first majority Green Party city council (in Arcata) and, uh, there was another stereotype … well, it’ll come to me. Oh, maybe this was it: We dig on our environment! Need tangible, event-form proof? […]

On a scrap of hempen paper, by flickering candlelight, occasionally sneezing from the talcum drifting off his wig, John Adams penned a letter to his dearest Abigail. “The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America,” he wrote, the feather-end of his quill tickling his nose. “I […]

Humboldt’s slow, steady ascent toward comedic respectability continues. In the last couple of years, our once “ha”-famished county has seen a dramatic uptick in smaller venue standup comedy events thanks to the efforts of Savage Henry Independent Times magazine and the Ba-Dum-Chh comedy troupe. Both have nurtured their own stables of locally grown yuk-slingers, while […]

This week, North Coasters are invited to year two of the rebranded Humboldt Made Fair — formerly the Redwood Acres Fair. The four day event (Thursday, June 21 through Sunday, June 24) will again take on the daunting, self-imposed task of trying to pull together all the non-weedy aspects of Humboldt livin’. An abundance of […]

The word, “festival” seems too brief to describe the month o’ marvel that’s gracing Blue Lake this summer. Even Oktoberfest, the festiest of fests, only lasts for two weeks. Dell’Arte’s Michael Fields said, however, that even if a longerish word were available, the Mad River Festival is too much of a tradition to lengthen. Now in […]

When I was a kid, I liked to dig. I’d dig holes in snow, dirt, sand, whatever. I was a friggin’ mole. Sadly, I never understood the artistic potential of all those pits and piles – that hole could have been a sand gorilla’s mouth, that hillock its nose. Dang!   I realize now it’s […]

As a working comedian, you want to play the big rooms. Simple logic dictates that the more seats you have the potential to squeeze butts into, the higher potential monetary return you’ll have for a given performance. You get that, right? But rumor has it that the world is not solely driven by economics. While […]