It’s never easy nail down a music genre. As with many things ineffable, the more you describe them, the more elusive they seem. Much like quantum physics, the more microscopic your view, the more you see, ad infinitum. This paradoxical quandary hit me while trying to pin what it was about Sugar Candy Mountain that […]
The Miniplex
Posted inMusic
Pandemic
There’s a lot that makes Humboldt stand out among the other 57 rather bleh counties in our great state. (OK, Mendocino is pretty cool. And Trinity has the Trinity River, so that’s awesome.) I don’t want to make this a long list of what Humboldt has going for it, but rather to point out one […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Big Girls, Big Brothers
THE CIRCLE. Where have all the techno-thrillers gone? I began to wonder this after my disappointing afternoon with The Circle. I claim to be no expert in the subgenre, but the ’80s and ’90s were rife with paranoid thought experiments about the cyberworld we were creating. Did we peak at The Matrix? Perhaps 9/11 brought […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Running for Cover
Reviews THE PROMISE. And so we revisit the conundrum of the historical drama, tangled with as recently as last week regarding The Zookeeper’s Wife. Again, a movie takes as its setting a horrific 20th century catastrophe — this time the outbreak of World War I and the Armenian genocide — and attempts to capture a […]
Posted inMusic
Looking for America
Among the few American songwriters who have profoundly impacted the American Songbook as I hazily define it, most would agree Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan are somewhere toward the top of the list. I wouldn’t be alone in putting Paul Simon way up there, too. With his early songwriting career rooted in folk music and […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Escape/Escapism
REVIEWS THE ZOOKEEPER’S WIFE. Period drama can, and in this case does, provide a respite from the breakneck editing and handheld camerawork that have subsumed the modern cinematic lexicon. It can give its creators an opportunity to focus on details of set design and costuming and language that, in a contemporary setting, might not merit […]
Posted inMusic
4 + 20 More
Humboldt has its own complicated and multifaceted relationship with its best-known cash crop. Whether you are hip enough to call it cannabis or still call it “the dope,” it’s tough to fully appreciate the extent of its influence on our county. I don’t have the space/time/patience to go into depth here in this column but […]
Posted inMusic
There and Back Again, a Musician’s Tale
We here in Humboldt are lucky. It’s easy to forget but deep down we know that. We live in a rural part of the state that’s hard to get to and have a low average median income for a family of four compared to much of the rest of California, if my memory is correct. […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Cringeworthy
TONI ERDMANN. I pride myself on an appreciation of bizarre cinema, from camp to cult to psychedelic to oddball. It’s not that I’m steely — plenty of genre films leave me unnerved or nonplussed. I cannot claim to understand Mulholland Drive or have particularly liked Holy Motors; nor are the charms of a blockbuster or […]
Posted inArts + Scene
The Old You
Reviews DONALD CRIED. For a small group of us who began refining — or at least establishing, as refinement may or may not have anything to do with it — our cinematic palates in the 1990s, this movie will carry with it some familiar modes and tones. Borne of the same non-movement that would eventually […]
Posted inMusic
Parties, Pre-Parties and Celebrations
Thursday Get your string thing on tonight — sounds dirtier than I planned it — down at The Jam in Arcata where local string bands Thursday Night Bluegrass and The Gatehouse Well take the stage around 9 p.m. for a $5 show. Be prepared to cut a rug. At the famous Logger Bar in Blue […]
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Motivation
Reviews LIFE. Offered a movie combining a screenplay by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, of Deadpool (2016) and Zombieland (2009), and the direction of Daniel Espinosa (Safe House, 2012), one would not necessarily expect that movie to be dark, scary or at times meditative. Nor could one be faulted for being surprised that that movie, […]