‘Tis the week before Christmas and through most of the county, not much is stirring — with a few exceptions. We’ll run through a handful of notable shows and then move on to some ideas for last minute Solstice/Xmas/Kwanzaa/belated-Hanukkah holiday shopping for music lovers — yes, the annual "best-of" lists. Most touring bands must be […]
Slideshow
Posted inNews
Top Ten Stories of 2007
Rails, trails, bankruptcy and dope. It was a topsy-turvy year in Humboldt County — a wierd, shook-up year now spilling its contents into the next. The politically active portion of the community is still divided along lines that were drawn almost 40 years ago, when the first hippies started showing up in Arcata and Eureka […]
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Inside Out
Figuring out what Reuben Sorensen’s paintings mean is almost as hard as figuring out how to get to his house. I’m counting the number of bridges I’ve driven over since I turned off the asphalt road that leads west from Redway through Briceland. My compact Japanese car is way out of its element. It’s raining […]
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Rural and Rebellious
There is something radical in making beautiful art in the abandoned parts of our public space, vulnerable not only to the elements but to any art critic or competitive painter. Imagine spending hours on a painting only to find it scrawled on, or painted over by the next muralist, or your medium simply demolished. The […]
Posted inArts + Scene
From a Lump of Clay
The hardest prose to write is a short story. I never have trouble filling up my column space; I have trouble trimming it down to my allotted number of words. Getting to the essence of a subject, removing extraneous material and making every word work is the tricky part of writing. The same is true […]
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The COG and the Machine
Humboldt county residents showed up en masse. Representatives from the Eureka business community were there. An environmental advocacy group gave a PowerPoint presentation. The meeting lasted until almost midnight. But this wasn’t a debate about Home Depot. It wasn’t a meeting about the Pacific Lumber bankruptcy or unregulated marijuana grow houses. Rather, it was a […]
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Gold From Green In A Gray Area
A gentleman with a neatly trimmed beard stands at the counter of an Arcata business on a weekday morning and asks the clerk for an eighth of an ounce of Trainwreck, a popular strain of sinsemilla marijuana. The young woman on the other side of a glass partition, who looks to be a typical Arcata […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Civil Disobedience
It was Sunday, a clear and warmish fall day, sun sitting low in the sky, with no wind even on the coast — a perfect day for civil disobedience. It all started some months ago with a letter to the Journal from one Benjamin Garlick. He’s pushing 40 now, but I knew him as a […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Gangster drags
Previews Alas, the Christmas season is upon us. Opening Friday, Nov. 9, is Fred Claus , in which Paul Giamatti plays Santa, who hires his jealous and irascible older brother Fred (Vince Vaughn) as a worker in order to get him out of jail. Making toys is not what Fred is suited for. With a […]
Posted inArts + Scene
What War Is
Annie Reid works in a small cabin studio in Westhaven. She’s surrounded by redwoods, and this time of year there’s the constant quiet drip of a rainforest in the rainy season. Her garden is a slightly tamed version of a natural forest floor, with ferns in profusion and a thick layer of redwood duff on […]
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Everyone Is Connected
Of all the luck John Haley has pushed away his breakfast plate, forked clean of its quiche, hash browns and biscuits. Billie Jo sits next to him, antsy. She keeps looking across the noisy, warm dining room inside Christ Church Episcopal at a doorway that leads to another hall from which an even louder hubbub […]
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Views of the Bay
A boat is a hole in the water you pour money into. At least that’s what I’ve always been told. But when it comes to the five candidates running for the Humboldt Bay Recreation and Conservation District Commission, that saying is one of the few things they can agree to disagree with. All of them […]