Tag Archives: Recent Work

Photo by Dustin Driver

Published in Solano Magazine

The night air is thick with heat and the sweet smell of fried beaver tails, a Quebecois confection of fried dough known as queue de castor. The St. Laurent River is alive with light, its waters reflecting the nonstop nightlife of Old Montreal. The narrow cobblestone streets teem with people-street performers, musicians belting out jazz, and locals drinking at sidewalk cafés. There are children, college students, clowns, old men with accordions, jugglers, sketch artists and street vendors. Smiles, snickers and laughter are everywhere. This is summer in a city that’s buried under snow for half the year. This is a celebration that will last until autumn, a kind of subdued, down-home revelry that only the Quebecois can pull off. Continue reading →

Published in Solano Magazine

Dating is difficult. Sure, you can peruse the magazine rack at Borders, hoping to strike up a conversation about the latest issue of “GQ” or “Nintendo Power.” Or maybe mill about in the produce department squeezing fruit until an attractive person asks you about tangelo ripeness. You could do those things, but they’re not likely to land you a date. You’ve got to be proactive. You’ve got to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and dating services. Or at least you had to—until now. Today I’ve done it for you, endured three types of assisted courtship: speed dating, professional matchmaking and online dating. Admittedly, I haven’t conducted an exhaustive study of each, but I’ve done enough to help you decide which service is for you. Continue reading →

Photo by Dustin Driver

Published in Solano Magazine

It is dizzyingly hot. The sharp smell of new clothes, perfumes, rubber and strange food marry to form an intoxicating fume that hangs in the air like fog. Bangkok’s Chatuchuk weekend market is a vast labyrinth of more than 15,000 cell-like stalls. It buzzes with the combined voices of more than 200,000 shoppers. Their eyes scour the endless shops for bargains. Their hands tear through mountains of T-shirts, racks of knock-off jeans, piles of watches, lacquered dishes, rice-paper lamps, cell phones, compact disk players, everything imaginable. Merchants scream at the crowds through megaphones at a speed and pitch that makes me wonder if even the Thais can understand them. Food vendors deep fry, sauté, boil, peel and serve everything from cocoanuts to noodles to grasshoppers. The insanity sprawls across 35 acres of land. More than $750,000 will change hands in just under two days of operation. The Chatuchuk Market is the largest of its kind in the world, humanity’s best impression of a beehive. Continue reading →

A small black plate is riveted to the cockpit’s interior next to my head. It reads, “No acrobatic maneuvers, including spins, approved.”

Right. I’ll keep that in mind. From where I’m sitting, it’s nothing but gauges. There must be hundreds of them, needles twitching, numbers recording countless vital statistics. This is my first flight lesson and I’ve known them for maybe 10 minutes. If that one tilts past 30, you’re in trouble. If that one is below 60, you’re in trouble. I don’t know what those two mean, but the instructor tells me they’re not important right now. Above all of them, the windscreen is nothing but gray-blue, the sky shining through the blur of the propeller. The runway is somewhere out there, just barely visible below the plane’s nose. My headset pops. It’s the instructor, sitting in the seat next to mine, a million miles away. “Go ahead and give it full throttle.” Continue reading →

Published in Solano Magazine

At 6:30 p.m. on April 27 at least 40,000 gallons of diesel fuel leaked into the Suisun Marsh. The fuel was bound for Sacramento and Reno via a 14-inch Kinder Morgan pipeline when it pushed its way through a crack and settled over 20 acres of marsh. Operators at Kinder Morgan noticed a drop in pressure soon after the pipe burst. They shut down the line and sent men to look for the leak the following morning. It did not take long to find it. There was enough fuel in the marsh to fill two backyard swimming pools; enough to drive one dozen fully loaded rigs from San Francisco to Los Angeles 43 times. Continue reading →