Brave New Park

It’s one of those steam baths of a late August night. Cicadas are revving up their engines in the post oaks and sycamores. Stealthy mosquitoes are feasting on my ankles. The corner of 33rd Street and Riverside Drive is officially closed to traffic, but there’s a desire line through the front yard of a house […]

by Russell Cobb

This Land Films Presents: Far Western Official Trailer

Amid the ashes of post-WWII Japan, the bittersweet sounds of American traditional country music drifted through the radio airwaves. Although intended for the U.S. occupying forces, a vast ‘ghost audience’ of young Japanese quickly warmed to the foreign, yet soothing, sounds. Since falling in love with the music in the 1950’s, Charlie Nagatani has lived […]

by Stuart Hetherwood

FILM

The Ballad of Sis Cunningham

In late May 1940, Woody Guthrie was riding high in New York City. Although Guthrie had already made a name for himself in California, he was still relatively unknown on the East Coast. Back in March, he performed at a musical celebration of the just-released film version of The Grapes of Wrath. Folk music archivist Alan […]

by Richard Higgs

Hope

In the woods, in the deep hole I dug, beneath the power cable and the roots of box elder trees, down among the grubs and the smooth stones, down where the earth is cool in any season, down where the shovel strikes and falters, down where no one sees, too deep for the centipede or […]

by Gordon Grice