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Category Archives: Column: Published Weekly in the Sonoma Index-Tribune

A weekly column published in the Sonoma Index-Tribune.

Sonoma’s Oscar Awards

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

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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Beware of Fauxnoma

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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Office Space Race

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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Sonoma’s Underground Public Art Movement

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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Simpleton at the Symposium

Conferences and conventions are a superb way to pretend one is working when one is actually not. I’m not sure what actually occurs at conferences apart from the formation of ad hoc drinking clubs and complaints about crappy wi-fi. Certainly some business is getting done, that is if business is charting an up-tick in one’s [...]
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Ransom Note Generator (redux)

My bookkeeper had good and bad news. I asked for the bad news first, like they do in the movies, figuring the good news would counterpoint the bad with something pithy and ironic. And we’d all laugh. Or at least nervously titter. It went like this: “The bad news is you’re profitable.” I wasn’t taken entirely [...]
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Shaken and Blurred

Among the more prevalent literary clichés are those that trade on writers and their relationship to alcohol. When writers write about drinking it is often in prose wearied by mock-heroics, broad bombast and the pale insight achieved by groping toward the light at the end of a bottle. Even the best writers writing about booze often [...]
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‘Twas a Wine Country Christmas

Regional variations on Christmas classics fascinate me. In parts of England, for example, the eleventh of the “Twelve Days of Christmas” sees “Eleven dames-a-dancing” rather than piper’s piping, which sounds a lot more interesting (unless I’m missing something). Albeit, the term “dame,” for me, evokes the kaleidoscopic burlesque of the Barbary Coast and buxom gun [...]
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Thanksgiving in Blue

Last year, I wrote a piece on the so-called “turducken,” the culinary abomination that shares its theme music with the Frankenstein movies, and received the following note from my Washingtonian pal Geoffrey Cain, who opined: “If you are going to write about the turducken, you should remember to mention the Brazilian turdukenaconda. A duck is force [...]
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