At this writing, next month (November 18) will mark the 108th anniversary of WWI’s conclusion. History has its way with us, blandly stomping through our times as an enormous, amused adolescent might kick through an ant colony. No hard feelings. Change is good, it’s said (often with a ragged sigh of resignation). One would rather […]
Oh the memories. Look at this grand old photo. Once upon a time! Me clutching a baseball glove! Under that sweet baseball cap there was hair all over my head, I can promise you that. I remember it well. Me and Maurice Chevalier. One other thing. “The moments are infinitely precious.” Yeah, I get it. […]
This week I join the ranks of Saint Augustine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Tolstoy. Like these towering, culture-affecting giants, I offer my Confessions to a waiting world, to posterity. You see, we great thinkers must ultimately unburden ourselves. What choice have we, huh, Tolstoy? By opening our hearts in this act of generous self-abnegation, we defang […]
There is something avatar-like about an Automotive Service Technician as beloved as Jim White. In the swirling transactional storm of an auto repair shop, a guy like Jim is a calming still-point of trust and familiarity, a beckoning porch light in a blizzard. Until recently, these very qualities made Jim a sought-after fixture at Village […]
“The Built Environment” is broadly defined as the vast space containing our human-made structures. Someday the term may include habitable starscrapers adrift in the vacuum between here and Jupiter, but for now it refers to everything we build here on the ground. Commercial properties, residential, mixed-use towers a half mile high (Burj Khalifa, Dubai’s monument […]
“Mother Earth provides and we are blessed to receive her bounty as nourishment. But watch out! That which grows from soil tastes like soil.” – Starfire Dickinson The above quote is wholly invented, but Starfire Dickinson is a real person. In other words Starfire Dickinson is also completely made up. But you’ll agree the opening […]
There is something very DC Comics about Santa Barbara County Search and Rescue. One minute Clark Kent is strolling around the Daily Planet newsroom and in the next he’s in a phonebooth frantically struggling into tights. For SBCSAR’s volunteer rescuers the tights-and-phone-booth situation has been obsoleted, but not the sudden call to arms. When someone […]
Hullo. I’m the local columnist whose carefully crafted words are the last thing your drowsy cockatiel sees every evening as he nods off on his little trapeze or whatever. My name is Jeff Wing, but since around third grade people have mis-addressed me as Jack Wayne, so feel free. Now, I don’t want to sound […]
Walking onto the wedding site I’m struck by the sense of happy commotion, energized folk crisscrossing the rural property with buoyant industry, faces prone with unconscious half-smiles as they each set to the task at hand. These striding busy bees wear a variety of tats, indelible ink mostly dedicated to soft-spoken renderings of the plant […]
I’ve been invited to rock ‘n’ roll’s inner sanctum by its madcap custodians; they who will usher me into the catacombs from whose torchlit stores they assemble their annual tent revival at the Lobero theatre. They’ve put together a particularly wig-flipping rock show for José Lobero’s venerable 150-year-old opera house, the curtain rising on their […]
Recently the bored and sated West has directed its gnat-like attention to two truly stomach-churning stories: 1) the intestinal assault of the grotesque but well-meaning cyclosporiasis parasite, and 2) increasingly bold public utterances of the soul-vaporizing S-word, if you can imagine. Two quick comments: neither the flaw-expunging rigors of long-game Darwinism nor the prospect of […]
A mother and daughter – Sissy Taran and Tiffany Howard – have co-written a book of the sort one reads in a single stunned sitting. The volume’s title – We are Resilient – is boldly declarative at first glance, but wading into the book (and it is designed as a series of digestible, stupefying short […]
You walk into the enormous, bleakly lit mega-dome that is Costco, and you’re reminded of one thing; Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He was the controversial Jesuit priest whose ideas about the Omega Point earned him a robust slapping around by the religious authorities of his day. A paleontologist and geologist by training, de Chardin fully […]
Old Spanish Days. Possibly you’ve heard of this adorably sleepy little Santa Barbara tradition. Horses feature in the thing, I think. There is a little dancing. Some of the more intrepid participants don period costumes and wander about. But for the influx of an estimated 100,000 visitors for the five-day celebration, you could blink and […]
Concours d’Elegance. Whether sung with a musical French accent or verbally mangled by the well-intentioned (moi), the term does not invoke a baloney and Velveeta® sandwich. “It literally means a ‘competition of elegance,’” explains Linda Rosso, President, CEO, and lead innovator of a looming extravaganza called the Santa Barbara Invitational Concours, whose inauguration November 7-8, […]
Venezuela, located at the northernmost tip of South America, occupies a typically enviable spot in the middle of the tropics. Gaze northward from a beach there and you’re taking in both the Caribbean and the mighty Atlantic. The country also sits atop a tectonic meeting place, a boundary where the Caribbean and South American plates […]
July 4 approaches. It seems to be an annual occurrence but that’s just an impression I have. It also seems to have some association with tea? One thing it surely commemorates is ordnance. Some of us remember a time when The Fourth of July meant a nationally recognized evening of maimed celebrants and curbside mailboxes […]
“We sold the book to Leonardo DiCaprio a long time ago,” Michael Armour says. He’s told the story so many times – lived with it for long enough – the episode’s clearly been stripped of its power; except for the power to make Armour’s stomach sink. “He and the director held onto the book for […]
“At Bakersfield College in the ‘70s, Charles put together and choreographed a whole program of those songs that had made Sinatra famous. The marching band played it at the football game on Friday nights. Everybody went to those football games.” Charles Wood III – jazz fiend, music educator, instrumental proselytizer, and a catalyzing match tossed […]
Dear Wised-Up Teenagers – We’ve had a good year. We so trounced our football rivals it made us momentarily sad, and Mr. Fauntleroy’s well-attended production of the classic musical Oklahoma! – or “the cringe cowboys,” to quote one of the more delicate critiques scrawled on the drama room door – was the talk of the […]
“The best characteristic in a partner is a good sense of humor,” declares Liz Heron. “Why? Because sometimes you do absolutely idiotic things and you make idiotic bids. You don’t want a partner who’s going to scream and yell at you. You want the partner that’s going to be supportive and helpful and constructive.” Yes…nicely […]
“Last year we rescued 744,000 pounds of food, and we got that out to 73 nonprofits throughout Santa Barbara County.” As restaurant chit-chat goes, this is an apt opener. Eryn Shugart and I are sipping coffee (me) and tea (Eryn) at Merci; a lovely little place whose name is a French/English cognate meaning (respectively) “thank […]
Amy arrives at the MJ offices today clutching her longhaired English Cream dachshund, Maxine – gifted to her as a puppy 14 years ago by a renowned novelist, longtime client, friend, and fitful dog lover. “My friend’s beloved King Charles just could not wrap her paws around the addition of this beautiful blonde bombshell to […]
Life is a continuum. From birdsong to bombardiers, from Charlie Bucket to Veruca Salt, from manna to inopportune picnic lightning – our time on the Earth’s surface is a bewildering maelstrom, a crapshoot. When I was but a child (your weekly clenched sigh here, reader) I saw that the world was aswirl with this strangeness. […]
A temperate summer evening. A young woman leaves her apartment barefoot to walk the rural neighborhood and revel in the season. Fading sun paints low-lying clouds a manic champagne pink, nightbirds begin swapping their melodious gossip, and all is right with the world. Three blocks from home our pedestrian rounds a corner to find a […]
The actor completes his audition with camera rolling, and even does it “off-book” – no script in hand. He’s come prepared and has done quite well, John has. Inching closer to that coveted role in this new TV series, he may soon join an ensemble that includes the great Celeste Holm! There’s just this one […]
The fuel noisily ignites; a controlled explosion. The ground shakes, the gantry falls away amid billowing clouds of exhaust, birds flee the scene in panicked, sunlit flocks. The rocket rises on visible flame, gains speed and is soon ballistically tearing through blue sky on a path of its own making, attaining – and ultimately escaping […]
In the iconic Weimar swan-song movie Cabaret, liberal-democratic 1933 Deutschland throws itself a final champagne-soaked party before the Nazis come in and churlishly stomp the balloons with their jackboots. In one of the film’s most famous scenes, a satin-draped Liza Minnelli delivers, from the stage of a nightclub, a vivid 11th-hour lecture on the evils […]
Scanning from East to West in the U.S. you get a sort of shorthand recapitulation of the country’s spiritual evolution, from Calvinist Plymouth Rock Pilgrims to California Governor Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown whose girlfriend, rock warbler magnifique Linda Ronstadt, was known to roller skate around the swinging gubernatorial manse. We seemed to shed or modify certain […]
I’m a man of a certain age but you wouldn’t know it to look at me – in part because the very idea of looking at me frightens you. But guess what? I arise at 5:30 in the morning and go to a gym and it shows! On any given day, gather your courage and […]
As organic molecules go, C8H10N4O2 is a winner two thumbs up green light all systems go punch that pedal is it warm in here oh I really like your shoes where’d you get those drapes my uncle carl had a Buick that color – ahem. Chemistry as a subject brought some of us low in […]
A reader writes: What inspired Jeff Wing to become an Astrophysicist? – Demonstrably Disquisitive in Downtown Diner Dear Demostrangmuh…Dear Reader, Thanks so much for your question. I don’t know how many of your fellow villagers are aware of my Astrophysicist status. Your published question makes it easier for me to broadcast this bit of personal […]
I arrive at the Santa Barbara Club with the jitters. The delightful and enviably energized Maria McCall has invited me to this MClub Lunch & Learn with a Valentine theme. The implausible Fannie Flagg – multifarious village litterateur / Manhattan night club bon vivant / bowling companion to Jack Nicholson – will be holding deadpan […]
Barry Schoer, president and longtime driving dynamo of Sanctuary Centers, is walking me around the half-completed structure on west Anapamu. This capstone project has been a long time coming. What does “long time” mean,exactly? The A-Team (remember Mr. T?) made its splashy TV debut the same year Barry Schoer’s ideas began coalescing – a marker […]
This all happened some time ago, but Barry Schoer explains the episode with residual heat. “I was seeing that when people graduated from Sanctuary House they didn’t have anywhere to go. Even if I got them a Section 8 voucher, landlords didn’t want them. They’d say to the prospective tenant, ‘Where have you been living? […]
I’ve been wearing the same outfit – a black short-sleeved HEMA® tee-shirt and Levi’s – every day since April 2016. This is a fact. Please note the happy-go-lucky photo parked at the end of my every column. That photo was taken several years ago and I am wearing that tee-shirt or one of its cousins […]
Meeting one’s hero can be perilous. On paper, anyway. “I wrote him a letter,” Fred Toye explains. Let’s call Fred’s outreach a Message in a Bottle. The earnest missive was written, after all, to Robert Wise – storied Hollywood director of The Sound of Music, West Side Story, The Sand Pebbles, The Day the Earth […]
“One of the first things I look at is what’s the essence of the tree that I’m working on? On a Japanese maple, for instance, in the wintertime it’s about the winter silhouette. In Japan they say when the tree goes dormant and loses its leaves, the tree is bearing its soul. Then when the […]
The wondrous origins of life have long been debated. Was life manufactured by a Loving, Purposeful Designer (Creationism), or did life emerge from a Tiresomely Sluggish, Eons-Long Series of Hollering, Arm-Waving, Self-Correcting Accidents (Evolutionary Darwinism)? These positions would seem to be mutually exclusive, yet there are skittish wafflers (with all due respect) unwilling to commit. […]
It’s frankly impossible to imagine a written document less likely to be read than a newspaper column on New Year’s Day. The original Magna Carta, maybe? Does that actually exist? Is it in the British Museum’s basement? etc. But the New Year’s Day newspaper column must be written. Much more than a contractual obligation – […]