Over the years I have walked as much of the Humboldt County Coast as possible. The extraordinary wild and windy Lost Coast is the equal of any coastal walk I have taken anywhere in the world. It combines solitude with stunning landscape and incredible intertidal shoreline. Not far behind is the Carruthers Cove to Skunk […]
Section Feature
Posted inNews
For the Love of Bowling
Co-opting blue collar culture in the name of irony is nothing new. Head up to Portland or over to Brooklyn and you’ll find numerous bowling alleys brimming with floppy-haired 20-somethings striking poses in carefully wound scarves and too-small cardigans. In these parts, things are — unsurprisingly — different. We laugh without inhibition. We are sincere […]
Posted inMusic
Visionaries
He’s known as the “King of the Surf Guitar” and he certainly earned the title. Dick Dale is a surfer from Orange County who created a big reverb-drenched guitar sound to recreate the way he felt riding waves. After filling smaller venues, he started renting the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa for what he called surfer […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
[T]rail Update No. 5
YYYYYEEEEESSSSS!!! That was my reaction as I left the North Coast Railroad Authority board meeting in Eureka last Wednesday. The board had just voted unanimously to receive a report from three of its directors, the ad hoc Humboldt Bay Rail Corridor Committee, and directed staff to bring back a resolution supporting “a broad-based Humboldt […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Lower Class Food
Editor: The wonderful headline “Schoolpocalypse Averted” (Nov. 8) reminded me of a culinary armageddon I witnessed in my days as a College of the Redwoods employee. I noticed that the students who lived in the dorms were only given the option of eating at the school cafeteria. Most of them had all of their financial […]
Posted inNews
A Home, Lost
The 2-year-old toddling in front of Nickelodeon, one pudgy first wrapped around the remote as her daddy packs boxes, took her first steps inside this small, plain duplex in McKinleyville. It’s where her parents celebrated her first birthday and first Christmas, where her older sister had friends so close they looked on it as […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism and the Inner Life of Artists
Kay Larson makes a convincing case that, after gathering particular artistic and philosophical strands together from others, John Cage added his own insights and innovations to become a dominant influence in 20th century arts. Those insights were primarily from his understanding of Zen Buddhism, and it is Larson’s singular contribution that as a Zen practitioner, […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
The Great Flood in History
…tear down thy house, build a ship; abandon wealth, seek after life; scorn possessions, save thy life. Bring up the seed of all kinds of living things into the ship which thou shalt build. Command from the gods to [the hero] Utnapishtim, Epic of Gilgamesh Similarities between the flood legend in the Babylonian Gilgamesh […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Thankfully
If the thought of a day indoors filled with inflatable parades and awkward exchanges with once-a-year relatives has you dreading November’s fourth Thursday, we have some good news. Humboldt offers a few Thanksgiving Day distractions for you turkeys who refuse to be cooped. Get a head start burning inevitable calories by venturing out, bright […]
Posted inEat + Drink
On the Waterfront
Mentioning Lazio’s around locals of a certain age is a bit like bringing up an old flame –there is sighing and smiling and remembrance of meals past. There are tales of tourists lined up in the summertime and locals streaming in on rainy evenings, shaking out their coats and warming up over bowls of chowder […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Star Struck
For the grand finale of a Sierra hiking trip this past August, we got up at 2:30 a.m. and left from Guitar Lake to summit Mt. Whitney for sunrise. There was a new moon that night, and the neon and incandescent civilization was far away. With no competing light in this rarified air more […]
Posted inEat + Drink
Stop the Madness!
Let us review the brief and troubled history of the Modern Cocktail. It began in the early ’90s, when youngsters realized that a Martini was a nice thing to order in a bar. A few variations on the Martini followed, most notably the godawful “dirty Martini” made with excessive amounts of olive brine, and the […]