Columns

I live in the outskirts of Sebastopol, so the so-called “mag crews” don’t appear at my front door. But when we lived in Hermosa Beach, they were a several-times-a-week fixture. Those hucksters were always young, always vulnerable, and always poised for the “kill” of getting you to sign up for unneeded magazines. Writer/director Andrea Arnold has fleshed out a New York Times article by Ian Urbana into American Honey, the 162-minute-long, sex, drugs and hip-hop filled, cross-country odyssey taken by Star (Sasha Lane), a luckless teen desperate to escape her groping father and the 24-hours-a-day responsibility of caring for her younger siblings. Star finds her means of escape in a Walmart by flirting with Jake (Shia LeBoeuf) the scruffy-looking oldest member of a group of teens who are escorted out by store security. “If you want a job,” Jake tells Star, “be at the Motel 6 tomorrow morning.”

The crowds that have been playing all summer along our Russian River are now dwindling which makes room for this weekend’s crowd of river workers and volunteers who will be bagging beach garbage, hauling flood debris and checking on the condition of our primary waterway and watershed.

We rarely quote our president, Donald Trump, but here goes: “I’m proud to be a citizen, you’re proud to be a citizen. The only people that are not proud to be citizens are the ones who are fighting us all the way about the word ‘citizen.’”

We’re ready to celebrate another Fourth of July. Some years the fireworks displays seem to evoke extra patriotic stirrings, sometimes they just make extra noise. Which is it this year? Are we celebrating a United States of America or, are we agonizing over a Divided States of America?

100 years ago – December 2, 1920

Find yourself dusting off the books you’ve collected over the years? If you’ve already read them and have a memory issue, you will enjoy them again! I have a friend in Portland, a professor of dentistry, and he purchased a copy of a book he thought he might like, he being a WWII “fan.”

I recently returned from the Midwest, where I talked to a lot of people about politics. It seemed to be on their minds.

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