And a Book: Golden Age of the Great Passenger Airships : Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg

Related Book: After the Affair: Healing the Pain and Rebuilding Trust When a Partner Has Been Unfaithful

My friend Dave Insley has a new CD coming out. Based on what I’m hearing on his MySpace page, it sounds great — I’ll buy it from CDBaby.

Previously, I’ve written about Dave’s music, calling it Western Soul, back when he was with the Trophy Husbands.

It’s good to know that Dave is still recording some damn good shit.

Also available from Amazon:

• Here with You Tonight
• Call Me Lonesome
• Trophy Husbands: Dark and Bloody Ground
• Trophy Husbands: Walk With Evil

When I was a much younger man, single and unencumbered in San Diego, I spent a lot of time in the Anza-Borrego desert. I was particular drawn to a place called Ghost Mountain.

In the 1930s or so, a writer of cheap fiction by the name of Marshall South had moved his family to Ghost Mountain. He claimed it was an experiment in alternative living, away from the maddening crowd of modernity. I used to say he was counter culture before counter culture was cool. He was an original hippy.

Years later I would learn that life on Ghost Mountain wasn’t quite as idyllic as his columns in Desert Magazine (I read every one at the SDSU library) made it to be. In the end, he reportedly cheated on his wife and his family broke up in acrimony.

I did, however, write a poem called At Yacquietepec. Previous blog post about it here.

Today I got an e-mail alerting me to the release of a documentary about Ghost Mountain.

Here is screening information:

Friday, March 21, 7:00pm

Borrego Performing Arts Center

530 Palm Canyon Drive, Borrego Springs

Q&A with Filmmakers. Suggested donation $10. No reservations. Seating is limited.

I wish I could go.

You can watch the trailer here.

Here’s a DVD about Anza-Borrego: Anza Borrego State Park, California

My friend Matt Welch appeared on Bill Moyers to talk about John McCain. Video and Transcript.

MATT WELCH: John McCain has an ideology that’s little appreciated and little understood by the press. He receives more adoring press probably than any Republican that I can think of in my lifetime, or certainly the last 20 years. And by the time you’re done reciting all of the marvelous things in his biography and talk about how much fun it was on the Straight Talk Express, there’s not a whole lot of time to talk about where he came up with his ideas about what the government should or should not do.

His ideas about what the government should do are basically, he wants to restore your faith and my faith and Mickey’s faith in the idea of America being a shining city on the hill. He wants to restore our faith in governing institutions, in the federal government, in other words, and use the federal government as a sort of blunt instrument to go after anything that makes us cynical about those institutions and the greatness of America. It’s a sort of national greatness conservatism which has a kind of militaristic component, let’s say, in which we are all supposed to sort of sacrifice ourselves to the greater cause, the higher power of American nationalism.

Now, go buy Matt’s book: McCain: The Myth of a Maverick