jeff wingBruce Campbell Matures (and other horrors) ..What Sir Laurence Olivier and Bruce Campbell do have in common, though, is that both their breakthrough roles had them working with...
jeff wingWho is Sean Kenney, and Why Isn't This Man Smiling?...Pike slowly turns his torso-encasing 25th century wheelchair to face them (and us), and we see the full effect of Delta rays on...
jeff wingPhantom in our ParadiseHe owned the 70s; the good 70s, not the shamefaced 70s. Paul Williams. You know him. Hai Karate aftershave, Lancer’s sparkling wine. His...
jeff wingThe Tail-Gunner's GiftIn the turbulent weeks before D-Day—the massive allied coastal invasion that heralded the beginning of the end of WWII—a Royal Air Force...
jeff wingMcIver. Grant McIver.“So I wait in line, get up to the front, tell them my story. Then, you know— ‘I’m an American.’ ‘Oh—you’re an American? Well, this only...
jeff wingCloudburst on James Fowler Road A guy falling 800 feet into the sea in a broken, flaming machine – it has the unfortunate distancing force of a fable...
jeff wingJoe Schneider Finds His Tranquility Base and Sticks the Landing Between bites of bagel, Joe Schneider—late of Schneider Autohaus—is patiently explaining why it’s so hard to land a spaceship on the...
jeff wingA Death on Garden StreetWhen Olga Duncan disappeared from her Garden Street apartment, her newish husband Frank wasn’t terribly concerned at first. We were less...
jeff wingSpring: What are the Chances?Your world is a wildflower-carpeted madhouse; and that's just for starters... Spring has arrived. Our unfortunate fealty to the numbing...
jeff wingLittle and Big John’s EpiphanyThe Universe giveth, and the Universe taketh away (to paraphrase), as has been seen. John Ridland, UCSB Professor Emeritus of English,...
jeff wingCaliforbearance and YouThe pedestrian’s stern expression is actually beaming at you a kind of brutalist forgiveness. So I finally checked my privilege. What do...
jeff wingWhere Were You in ‘82? An Oral History of Santa Barbara Clubland’s Age of EnlightenmentSharing a house in Goleta and surviving on baked potatoes and stolen frat-house boxed wine (we owe you, Sigma Nu) life was good; great...
jeff wingDeath of CancerIn 2015, Kerry Witzeman decided to stop in at the doctor to see what the deal was with a nagging little urinary tract thingy she couldn’t...
jeff wingArmadillo DaysIn modern sociological terms what we’re talking about is a Herding Instinct Proclivity (HIP). The Patty Duke theme says it best: “Meet...
jeff wingThe Future is Not What it Used to Be1997 was, after all, the thrillingly futuristic year the Space Family Robinson was said to have left Earth in their roomy flying saucer,...
jeff wingAlice Keck Park Memorial Garden – The Eden That Oil BuiltAlice Keck Park Memorial Garden will be tended and cared for in actual perpetuity—like Bruce Dern’s space-borne forests in the sci-fi...
jeff wingArjen’s Sense of Unbegryplik WonderThe string-powered hands worked like real ones. His immediate field of vision, though, did not illuminate a path from Haskerdijken to...
jeff wing Clyde, Venetia, Kelsi, and Planet X As he neared the end of his time on Earth, Clyde crazily wished aloud for the sort of thing that compels uneasy laughter from...
jeff wingI've Fallen to Earth, and I Can't Get UpWhen, at 15 years old, Davie was mightily popped in the left eye by a schoolyard chum in a brief tussle over a girl they both liked, the...
jeff wingTrader Joe's and the Death of Froot LoopsInside TJ’s, the cool-looking diagonalized aisles create a spiritual and spatial confusion that has artfully tattooed shoppers bumping...
jeff wingTeleology, Cosmology, Tautology. Rinse and RepeatThe monstrously implausible sequence of cosmic events to which we owe our existence is not entirely credible. Why does the country seem...
jeff wingPersonal Space: The Final FrontierI would rather have a fulsome bee beard go angrily wrong than suffer a stranger doing that two-handed chopping thing I saw once on the...
jeff wingDeath and the Big WowThe brain specialist, though, was not impressed. “I’m not going to stand here and listen to this!” he barked, and whirled out of the room...