Money On Trees
Big cash nearly fell into Shunka Wakan’s lap. Other Earth First!ers are kinda happy it didn’t.
Cover Story
Money On Trees
As the jury trial for the civil suit Kathryn Miller v. the Trees Foundation puttered to a start last week inside Courtroom 3 at the Humboldt County Courthouse, Shunka Wakan — a key witness for the plaintiff — spent mornings sitting on the hard wooden benches in the long hallway outside the courtroom. During breaks,…
All My Loving
directed by Tony Palmer Isolde Films Director Tony Palmer’s examination of the world of rock ’n’ roll in 1968 serves as a fascinating time capsule. Broadcast on the BBC 39 years ago, All My Loving , “a film of pop music,” was not shown in the U.S. and hasn’t been released on DVD until now.…
The Original Patriots: Northern California Indian Veterans of World War Two
by Chag Lowry Self-published In Ken Burns’ new documentary series about World War II, which began airing on PBS Sept. 23, only one Native American voice is included. When the series was first announced last spring, there were none at all. After public protest and a quick reedit, Burns added two Latinos and a token…
Why Does Humboldt Quake?
These diagrams are your key to unlocking the secrets of our local seismic activity. They show fault boundaries between rigid rock plates moving over warmer, weaker rocks below. For example, the San Andreas Fault is the boundary between the Pacific and American plates. The Pacific Plate extends from here to Japan, and the American Plate…
This Different Rhythm
He doesn’t lay claim to inventing reggae, but Frederick “Toots” Hibbert says he gave the Jamaican music style its name. Born in a town called May Ten in the hills far from Kingston, Toots headed for the lights of the city when he was still a teenager. As he tells the tale, “I’m from the…
Kalimeraki
The next day the poem unwrote itself….
Straw Into Gold
Born in 1917, Marcel Duchamp turned a manufactured urinal on its side, signed it R. Mutt, called it Fountain and entered it in an avant-garde art show. Predictably, there was a great hue and cry from fellow avant-gardists as well as traditionalists, and this clamor was exactly what Duchamp was after. It is clear that…
Bending Gender
This past Sunday was intended to be a very gay day for me. Unfortunately, Humboldt County’s annual Gay Pride festival and parade were pretty much rained out, so I lazed about on the couch for the morning. The cause was not lost, however, since I still made it over to the HSU campus for a…
The Faithless Pages
This was how the Times-Standard began a story about the Jewish New Year known as Rosh Hashanah: “The blast of the ram’s horn marks the end to the summer season. Jewish people around the world are roused by the piercing sound of this ancient instrument known as the shofar. The sound of the shofar announces…
You Dropped the Bomb
Two great big Earth-shattering pieces of news came down the pike last week, and for various reasons we’re not going to treat either one with any degree of completeness. One: Dateline, Corpus Christi, Texas. The Pacific Lumber Co., which filed bankruptcy in January, submitted its long-awaited reorganization plan on Monday. In brief, how does the…
Juice and Permaculture
Dave Feral pulls a handful of apples from a cardboard box and drops them into the hopper at the top of his cider press. As invisible whirling blades chop the fruit, he follows the apples with an equal amount of pears. Juice is already trickling into a glass pitcher from a wooden trough at the…
All Bases Covered
Previews No, I can’t get enough of Jane Austen. Opening Friday, Oct. 5, is The Jane Austen Book Club, based on the popular novel by Karen Joy Fowler. Written and directed by Robin Swicord, who wrote the screenplay for Memoirs of a Geisha, the story is about a Jane Austen book club in California whose…
Tokyo Year Zero
Tokyo Year Zero by David Peace Alfred A. Knopf There’s nothing like an occupying army to stir desperation into the chaos of defeat. Just ask Detective Minami, chief of one of the two murder-investigation units operating in Tokyo during “Year Zero” — the first year after Japan’s surrender to and occupation by the United States.…
