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Author Archives: Daedalus Howell

Oscar’s All a’Twitter

By Daedalus Howell | March 7th, 2010
Come February of every year, scads of entertainment journalists engage in a ritual peculiar to their beat. They apply for press credentials to cover the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ annual Academy Awards. An awards ceremony for motion pictures presented on television epitomizes traditional media. If the gold statuette was wrapped in newspaper like [...]
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Sonoma’s Oscar Awards

By Daedalus Howell | March 5th, 2010
Roll out the red carpet, get on your designer duds and pause, pivot and pose for the paparazzi – Oscar is back. As in years past, preceding the big to-do on Sunday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences separately celebrated scientific and technical achievements in the film industry with its so-called Sci-Tech awards. This, [...]
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Don’t Work For Free

By Daedalus Howell | February 26th, 2010
There’s a problem many of my colleagues have faced of late. With alarming frequency, local entrepreneurs, freelancers and others who make their livings proffering talents that have taken lifetimes to develop are asked to work for free. Such requests, of course, are seldom as forthrightly phrased as “work for free,” camouflaged as they are in chummy [...]
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From Kindling to Kindle: Will the future of reading affect the future of writing?

By Daedalus Howell | February 22nd, 2010
James Joyce, it is said, became so disgruntled while drafting his first novel that he threw it on the fire. His girlfriend rescued the work-in-progress from the flames, and the subsequent rewrite became A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Such acts of literary self-immolation and redemption could only occur in our once-analog [...]
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Beware of Fauxnoma

By Daedalus Howell | February 19th, 2010
Defining the “Sonoma lifestyle” can be an elusive proposition, especially since its interpretation is often left to marketers and PR flaks who draw from warmed-over notions of Napa from under a setting Tuscan sun. This is something I’m called upon to do, both professionally and socially, with some regularity. The former I can usually accomplish with [...]
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Redrum!

By Daedalus Howell | February 17th, 2010
Finally, someone found a justification for film school. What seems to be an attempt at Valentine’s Day marketing in Petaluma, CA, reads surprisingly like an entreaty to homicide. “Redrum” occupies a special place in our culture thanks to Stanley Kubrick’s take on “The Shining” and the crooked index finger of a child actor Danny Lloyd. [...]
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Office Space Race

By Daedalus Howell | February 12th, 2010
Inside the landmark El Dorado Hotel is the El Dorado Kitchen and adjacent to that is the coffee house “Kitchenette.” Somehow, the metonym for these three enterprises has become the affectionate abbreviation “EDK,” a location that has blossomed over the past year into the de facto office for a dozens of Sonoma entrepreneurs. This genus of [...]
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Web 3.0, the Pedantic Web

By Daedalus Howell | February 5th, 2010
No sooner has popular culture digested the term “Web 2.0” than the ante is upped by the next generation of the World Wide Web. Behold, “Web 3.0.” Um, yeah. This unfortunate protologism, doomed to eternal comparison to its pithy predecessor, proves the adage that “Good technologists borrow, great technologists steal and then add 1.” Also known as [...]
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Sonoma’s Underground Public Art Movement

By Daedalus Howell | January 29th, 2010
Though Sonoma boasts a statue here, a mural there, the Valley’s relative dearth of public art may account for an increasingly apparent faction of rogue artists who have come to fill the void. Aesthetic renegades, Sonoma is their canvas, though the DNA of their work is a complex, if often controversial, double helix of graffiti and [...]
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Hanna Winery and Vineyards

By Daedalus Howell | January 28th, 2010
Your faithful lifestyle scribe penned the “Upfront” piece in the January-February edition of Tasting Panel Magazine. The profile of Hanna Winery and Vineyards president Chris Hanna is part of an issue-wide “Women in Wine” theme also featuring photos by Flash Lely. It was a delight to chat with Hanna who has enjoyed great success with [...]
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