Published Articles
“Cowgirl Camp,” MORE
Propped between the mesquite and cedar trees, the roadside signs read “Average Joe’s Day Hunting” and “You’re in God’s Country. Don’t drive through it like hell.” This is rural Texas, land of roadside beverage barns, and I’m here at…
Click for full article
"The Lafayette Reservoir is an Oasis in the Middle of the East Bay," SFGATE
On a recent weekday summer morning, the water was glistening at the Lafayette Reservoir Recreation Area. In this natural nirvana where a bald eagle was spotted in March and a great horned owl in June, more than a hundred cars...
www.sfgate.com/local/article/lafayette-reservoir-is-locals-favorite-bay-area-18273177.php
"What's Hot in Yountville, California," COWBOYS & INDIANS
Driving into the town of Yountville we're in awe of the perfect-looking fields of red and yellow tulips and the infinite rows of vineyard grapes in Northern California's lavish Napa Valley. Here, wine and cuisine reign supreme. During the next three days...
Click for full article
"Drift Away in Bodega Bay," COWBOYS & INDIANS
Climbing into the small kayak and seating myself at the narrow bow takes some doing, but luckily my travel buddy, M.K., is game for pushing the little vessel off the rocks and into Bodega Bay, then...
Click for full article
"Wine Country Wonder," COWBOYS & INDIANS
California's Napa Valley is famed for its viniculture and gastronomic heights, this being the land of the $5,000-plus Screaming Eagle Sauvignon Blanc and Thomas Keller's The French Laundry. Newly constructed on...
Click for full article
"Art Gallery: Luchita Hurtado," COWBOYS & INDIANS
She traveled the world with her three husbands, socializing in avant-garde circles with prominent artists and intellectuals. In New York, she spent time with Frida Kahlo, Willem de Kooning...
Click for full article
“Riding Mendocino,” COWBOYS & INDIANS
A gentle ocean fog is wafting through the air in Mendocino, California, moistening the redwoods, Douglas firs, and Pacific madrona trees, the wild rhododendrons and orchids that make this part of Northern California so lush and green. Seals are lazing on rocks off the shore of the Pacific Ocean. Amid this West Coast idyll, horseback outfitter Lari Shea is getting ready for the most-requested piece of her riding expeditions: a full-throttle canter down the beach…
Click for full article
"The Pearl of New England," THE SANTA FE NEW MEXICAN
When I flew east to the Vineyard in early June, I knew I'd find beaches, yachts, fishermen, lobsters, sheep farms, and educated New Englanders. What I didn't expect was that Martha's Vineyard would be Santa Fe's East Coast doppleganger: a distant arts colony. Martha's Vineyard proves as uniquely gorgeous and dependent on tourism as Santa Fe. Its sunsets are sherbet orange and raspberry just like Santa Fe's, and the Vineyard is selling the experience of its lifestyle in unspoiled nature, too, as its summer population swells from 15,000 to 120,000...
Click for full article
"Why Wyoming is Prime Terrain for Mystery Writers," COWBOYS & INDIANS
Sparsely populated Wyoming is the ninth-largest state in the country, but with less than 500,000 residents, the least populous--which means there's a heck of a lot of terrain where you can chuck a dead body…
Click for full article
"New Mexico Magic," COWBOYS & INDIANS
Santa Fe Indian Market 101 arrives in August with artists, fashion, and frybread. Close to 1,000 artists...
Click for full article
"Santa Fe Travel Guide: Insider Intel," COWBOYS & INDIANS
Santa Fe in August is all about Indian Market. Any time in Santa Fe is art-intensive, but during Indian Market, everything amps up...
Click for full article
"Exploring Chicano Identity," DIABLO
A printmaker and muralist with strong ties to the East Bay, Malaquias Montoya was one of the founders of the social...
Click for full article
"Art Gallery: Steve Wrubel," COWBOYS & INDIANS
Just 18 months after Berkeley, California native Steve Wrubel began taking rodeo photos, there he was shooting the best of the best at the National Finals Rodeo. "You're not supposed to..."
Click for full article
"Art Gallery: Sarah Winkler," COWBOYS & INDIANS
Nobody else paints the Rockies like Sarah Winkler. Her acrylic and mixed-media abstract landscapes with fragmented color fields and crushed minerals are as...
Click for full article
"My Favorite Room: A Folk Art Candy Land," THE SANTA FE NEW MEXICAN
A lime-green fireplace and chocolate-colored walls aren't for everyone. But for a jewelry designer living in a town of artists, they're sublime. Enter Coreen Cordova's living room...
Click for full article
"My Favorite Room: Alton Walpole Designed His Favorite Room and Built the Road To It," THE SANTA FE NEW MEXICAN
These days, Alton Walpole, line producer, unit production manager, and owner of Mountainair Films, mostly oversees movie...
Click for full article
"A Guy, A Horse, A Hat, A Sunset," COWBOYS & INDIANS
He's been called "the most important Western artist alive" and it's been said that he "may very well be the best Western artist, ever." Though he only began painting Western art in 2014, his works have certainly blown up....
Click for full article
Book Review: "The Guide" by Peter Heller, FINE LIFESTYLES SANTA FE & ALBUQUERQUE
At a luxury fishing resort near Crested Butte, Colorado, in the very near future a fishing guide named Jack finds his life changed in a matter of days...
Click for full article
Book Review: "Winter Counts" by David Heska Wanbli Weiden, FINE LIFESTYLES SANTA FE & ALBUQUERQUE
Cell service is hit-or-miss. Temperatures dip to twenty below. The Stones' "Gimme Shelter" blasts at the local bar. In the parking lot, expensive rides tuck in at the far end so they don't get dinged. This is home turf for...
Click for full article
Book Review: "Hannah's War" by Jan Eliasberg, FINE LIFESTYLES SANTA FE & ALBUQUERQUE
Paris has been liberated. In Los Alamos, NM, scientists overseen by Dr. Robert Oppenheimer are secretly building the gadget, among them the self-determined Austrian Jewish physicist...
Click for full article
Book Review: "Hit List" by Stuart Woods, FINE LIFESTYLES SANTA FE & ALBUQUERQUE
The wry, suave sometimes-attorney Stone Barrington pilots his own jet. He owns a lavish townhouse in Manhattan, a sprawling country estate in England, and a coastal getaway in Maine. He pals around with...
Click for full article
Book Review: "I Got Mine" by John Nichols, FINE LIFESTYLES SANTA FE & ALBUQUERQUE
He arrived in Taos in 1969. John Nichols was 29 then, intent on furthering his career as a writer and adamant about pursuing his left-leaning socio-political ideology. In the decades since, he's worked with film legends like...
Click for full article
“Art or Bust,” SANTA FEAN
By my second trip out to Doug Coffin’s art studio in Abiquiu, I’m getting the hang of things. Lavender mountains and yellow fields, cows chewing scrub grass alongside Highway 84. Takeout lunch from Bode’s, the best general store anywhere, stocked with The New York Times, horse halters, even a fabulous deli: smoked turkey sandwich on whole wheat for me, posole and sopaipillas for Coffin. Back at “Doug Coffin World Headquarters,” as Coffin playfully terms it, aromatic cedar incense wafts though the air and there’s nary a visitor, although Bob Dylan, Don Henley, and Robbie Robertson are around for tunes. It’s an artist’s life…
Click for full article
“Ottmar Liebert,” COWBOYS & INDIANS
He has performed with Santana, opened for Miles Davis, and reinterpreted Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” with a bossa nova beat. He’s toured around the world and could live anywhere that gives him decent access to an airport he can jet in and out of…
Click for full article
“Loving Ryo," COWBOYS & INDIANS
For the last 14 years at every job I've had, the receptionists all know one thing: if a call comes in about my horse, Ryo, find me. Horses can go so quickly if they colic. Ryo never did colic, although...
Click for full article
"Artist Studio: William Hook," SOUTHWEST ART
"So Hook, if I may be so familiar..." "Go ahead, that's what everyone calls me." "You've got a great set-up: a home in Carmel for winter, another in Santa Fe for summer"...
Click for full article
“Ride Like The Wind,” COWBOYS & INDIANS
As I climb on the back of Rodney A. Grant’s Harley-Davidson motorcycle, he tells me, “Put your feet here,” motioning to the second set of footrests he’s flipping down. “Get on, and hold on. And don’t get up suddenly.” I wrap my arms around his motorcycle jacket and we roar off. Wow. We’re on the I-25 frontage road near Santa Fe, New Mexico doing about 50. The bike is vibrating, the engine’s loud, the breeze is cool, and the sunflowers are very close…
Click for full article
“Easy Rider Summer,” COWBOYS & INDIANS
Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper riding motorcycles on an empty high-desert road under a pure blue sky—Fonda in flag-adorned leather and Hopper in a suede-fringed buckskin like rocker David Crosby would later adopt as his look—as Steppenwolf pumps out “Born to Be Wild” on the soundtrack: “Head out on the highway/Lookin’ for adventure/And whatever comes our way….” Pine trees fly by as the choppers climb into higher Southwest elevations…
Click for full article
Book Review: "Educated, A Memoir" by Tara Westover, FINE LIFESTYLES SANTA FE & ALBUQUERQUE
Who knows what transpires even today in some wide open spaces of the West? Where Tara Westover grew up on an isolated homestead in the Rocky Mountains, she took solace in reading between chores like salvaging iron. She tried not to feel left out when, on the highway below...
Click for full article
Book Review: "Deep Creek, Finding Hope In The High Country" by Pam Houston, FINE LIFESTYLES SANTA FE & ALBUQUERQUE
Pam Houston has been called "the rodeo queen of American letters" and with good cause. Her memoir, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country, about living on her 120-acre homestead in Creede, Colorado, four hours north of Santa Fe, is a deeply felt...
Click for full article
Book Review: "One Blade Of Grass" by Henry Shukman, FINE LIFESTYLES SANTA FE & ALBUQUERQUE
In his deeply honest chronicle "One Blade Of Grass: Finding the Old Road of the Heart, A Zen Memoir," author Henry Shukman traces his life path from anxious English teenager to travel writer to Zen teacher who now runs...
Click for full article
Book Review: "Residue" by Michael McGarrity, FINE LIFESTYLES SANTA FE & ALBUQUERQUE
With the recently released "Residue," New York Times bestselling author Michael McGarrity returns to his New Mexico-based mystery series revolving around fictional former police chief...
Click for full article
Book Review: "Desert Chrome" by Kathryn Wilder, FINE LIFESTYLES SANTA FE & ALBUQUERQUE
She's lived on Maui. In Arizona and California. Finally, in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, where connecting with horses--especially wild mustangs--has helped Kathryn Wilder ground herself and come to terms with...
Click for full article
"Great Trips: Experience Indian Market in Santa Fe," COWBOYS & INDIANS
As Santa Fe opens up again and Indian Market returns in person (August 21-22), this favorite New Mexico mountain town is fine-tuning its comeback. Offerings...
www.cowboysindians.com/2021/07/experience-indian-market-in-santa-fe/
"Sweet Jane,” MOVIELINE
He’s off doing Terrence Malick’s World War II epic “The Thin Red Line” now, but until that film comes out, one would be justified in taking Thomas Jane for a guy who falls naturally into edgy, contemporary sex-and-drugs roles. He starred as beat-hero-of-self-indulgence Neal Cassady in “The Last Time I Committed Suicide,” then went on to play the coke dealer who blows the big rip-off in “Boogie Nights”…
Click for full article
“Bigger & Better,” MOVIELINE
Everything you hear or read about director Michael Bay claims that everything about him is bigger and better than the next guy. There’s his 200-pound mastiff, his brawny black GMC Yukon, his snazzed-up Nike commercials, his deal at Fox for the upcoming FBI series “Quantico,” and—most importantly—his big-budget, big-screen hits: “The Rock,” box office $332 million worldwide, and “Armageddon,” $430 million worldwide and still counting. There’s also…
Click for full article
Propped between the mesquite and cedar trees, the roadside signs read “Average Joe’s Day Hunting” and “You’re in God’s Country. Don’t drive through it like hell.” This is rural Texas, land of roadside beverage barns, and I’m here at…
Click for full article
"The Lafayette Reservoir is an Oasis in the Middle of the East Bay," SFGATE
On a recent weekday summer morning, the water was glistening at the Lafayette Reservoir Recreation Area. In this natural nirvana where a bald eagle was spotted in March and a great horned owl in June, more than a hundred cars...
www.sfgate.com/local/article/lafayette-reservoir-is-locals-favorite-bay-area-18273177.php
"What's Hot in Yountville, California," COWBOYS & INDIANS
Driving into the town of Yountville we're in awe of the perfect-looking fields of red and yellow tulips and the infinite rows of vineyard grapes in Northern California's lavish Napa Valley. Here, wine and cuisine reign supreme. During the next three days...
Click for full article
"Drift Away in Bodega Bay," COWBOYS & INDIANS
Climbing into the small kayak and seating myself at the narrow bow takes some doing, but luckily my travel buddy, M.K., is game for pushing the little vessel off the rocks and into Bodega Bay, then...
Click for full article
"Wine Country Wonder," COWBOYS & INDIANS
California's Napa Valley is famed for its viniculture and gastronomic heights, this being the land of the $5,000-plus Screaming Eagle Sauvignon Blanc and Thomas Keller's The French Laundry. Newly constructed on...
Click for full article
"Art Gallery: Luchita Hurtado," COWBOYS & INDIANS
She traveled the world with her three husbands, socializing in avant-garde circles with prominent artists and intellectuals. In New York, she spent time with Frida Kahlo, Willem de Kooning...
Click for full article
“Riding Mendocino,” COWBOYS & INDIANS
A gentle ocean fog is wafting through the air in Mendocino, California, moistening the redwoods, Douglas firs, and Pacific madrona trees, the wild rhododendrons and orchids that make this part of Northern California so lush and green. Seals are lazing on rocks off the shore of the Pacific Ocean. Amid this West Coast idyll, horseback outfitter Lari Shea is getting ready for the most-requested piece of her riding expeditions: a full-throttle canter down the beach…
Click for full article
"The Pearl of New England," THE SANTA FE NEW MEXICAN
When I flew east to the Vineyard in early June, I knew I'd find beaches, yachts, fishermen, lobsters, sheep farms, and educated New Englanders. What I didn't expect was that Martha's Vineyard would be Santa Fe's East Coast doppleganger: a distant arts colony. Martha's Vineyard proves as uniquely gorgeous and dependent on tourism as Santa Fe. Its sunsets are sherbet orange and raspberry just like Santa Fe's, and the Vineyard is selling the experience of its lifestyle in unspoiled nature, too, as its summer population swells from 15,000 to 120,000...
Click for full article
"Why Wyoming is Prime Terrain for Mystery Writers," COWBOYS & INDIANS
Sparsely populated Wyoming is the ninth-largest state in the country, but with less than 500,000 residents, the least populous--which means there's a heck of a lot of terrain where you can chuck a dead body…
Click for full article
"New Mexico Magic," COWBOYS & INDIANS
Santa Fe Indian Market 101 arrives in August with artists, fashion, and frybread. Close to 1,000 artists...
Click for full article
"Santa Fe Travel Guide: Insider Intel," COWBOYS & INDIANS
Santa Fe in August is all about Indian Market. Any time in Santa Fe is art-intensive, but during Indian Market, everything amps up...
Click for full article
"Exploring Chicano Identity," DIABLO
A printmaker and muralist with strong ties to the East Bay, Malaquias Montoya was one of the founders of the social...
Click for full article
"Art Gallery: Steve Wrubel," COWBOYS & INDIANS
Just 18 months after Berkeley, California native Steve Wrubel began taking rodeo photos, there he was shooting the best of the best at the National Finals Rodeo. "You're not supposed to..."
Click for full article
"Art Gallery: Sarah Winkler," COWBOYS & INDIANS
Nobody else paints the Rockies like Sarah Winkler. Her acrylic and mixed-media abstract landscapes with fragmented color fields and crushed minerals are as...
Click for full article
"My Favorite Room: A Folk Art Candy Land," THE SANTA FE NEW MEXICAN
A lime-green fireplace and chocolate-colored walls aren't for everyone. But for a jewelry designer living in a town of artists, they're sublime. Enter Coreen Cordova's living room...
Click for full article
"My Favorite Room: Alton Walpole Designed His Favorite Room and Built the Road To It," THE SANTA FE NEW MEXICAN
These days, Alton Walpole, line producer, unit production manager, and owner of Mountainair Films, mostly oversees movie...
Click for full article
"A Guy, A Horse, A Hat, A Sunset," COWBOYS & INDIANS
He's been called "the most important Western artist alive" and it's been said that he "may very well be the best Western artist, ever." Though he only began painting Western art in 2014, his works have certainly blown up....
Click for full article
Book Review: "The Guide" by Peter Heller, FINE LIFESTYLES SANTA FE & ALBUQUERQUE
At a luxury fishing resort near Crested Butte, Colorado, in the very near future a fishing guide named Jack finds his life changed in a matter of days...
Click for full article
Book Review: "Winter Counts" by David Heska Wanbli Weiden, FINE LIFESTYLES SANTA FE & ALBUQUERQUE
Cell service is hit-or-miss. Temperatures dip to twenty below. The Stones' "Gimme Shelter" blasts at the local bar. In the parking lot, expensive rides tuck in at the far end so they don't get dinged. This is home turf for...
Click for full article
Book Review: "Hannah's War" by Jan Eliasberg, FINE LIFESTYLES SANTA FE & ALBUQUERQUE
Paris has been liberated. In Los Alamos, NM, scientists overseen by Dr. Robert Oppenheimer are secretly building the gadget, among them the self-determined Austrian Jewish physicist...
Click for full article
Book Review: "Hit List" by Stuart Woods, FINE LIFESTYLES SANTA FE & ALBUQUERQUE
The wry, suave sometimes-attorney Stone Barrington pilots his own jet. He owns a lavish townhouse in Manhattan, a sprawling country estate in England, and a coastal getaway in Maine. He pals around with...
Click for full article
Book Review: "I Got Mine" by John Nichols, FINE LIFESTYLES SANTA FE & ALBUQUERQUE
He arrived in Taos in 1969. John Nichols was 29 then, intent on furthering his career as a writer and adamant about pursuing his left-leaning socio-political ideology. In the decades since, he's worked with film legends like...
Click for full article
“Art or Bust,” SANTA FEAN
By my second trip out to Doug Coffin’s art studio in Abiquiu, I’m getting the hang of things. Lavender mountains and yellow fields, cows chewing scrub grass alongside Highway 84. Takeout lunch from Bode’s, the best general store anywhere, stocked with The New York Times, horse halters, even a fabulous deli: smoked turkey sandwich on whole wheat for me, posole and sopaipillas for Coffin. Back at “Doug Coffin World Headquarters,” as Coffin playfully terms it, aromatic cedar incense wafts though the air and there’s nary a visitor, although Bob Dylan, Don Henley, and Robbie Robertson are around for tunes. It’s an artist’s life…
Click for full article
“Ottmar Liebert,” COWBOYS & INDIANS
He has performed with Santana, opened for Miles Davis, and reinterpreted Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” with a bossa nova beat. He’s toured around the world and could live anywhere that gives him decent access to an airport he can jet in and out of…
Click for full article
“Loving Ryo," COWBOYS & INDIANS
For the last 14 years at every job I've had, the receptionists all know one thing: if a call comes in about my horse, Ryo, find me. Horses can go so quickly if they colic. Ryo never did colic, although...
Click for full article
"Artist Studio: William Hook," SOUTHWEST ART
"So Hook, if I may be so familiar..." "Go ahead, that's what everyone calls me." "You've got a great set-up: a home in Carmel for winter, another in Santa Fe for summer"...
Click for full article
“Ride Like The Wind,” COWBOYS & INDIANS
As I climb on the back of Rodney A. Grant’s Harley-Davidson motorcycle, he tells me, “Put your feet here,” motioning to the second set of footrests he’s flipping down. “Get on, and hold on. And don’t get up suddenly.” I wrap my arms around his motorcycle jacket and we roar off. Wow. We’re on the I-25 frontage road near Santa Fe, New Mexico doing about 50. The bike is vibrating, the engine’s loud, the breeze is cool, and the sunflowers are very close…
Click for full article
“Easy Rider Summer,” COWBOYS & INDIANS
Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper riding motorcycles on an empty high-desert road under a pure blue sky—Fonda in flag-adorned leather and Hopper in a suede-fringed buckskin like rocker David Crosby would later adopt as his look—as Steppenwolf pumps out “Born to Be Wild” on the soundtrack: “Head out on the highway/Lookin’ for adventure/And whatever comes our way….” Pine trees fly by as the choppers climb into higher Southwest elevations…
Click for full article
Book Review: "Educated, A Memoir" by Tara Westover, FINE LIFESTYLES SANTA FE & ALBUQUERQUE
Who knows what transpires even today in some wide open spaces of the West? Where Tara Westover grew up on an isolated homestead in the Rocky Mountains, she took solace in reading between chores like salvaging iron. She tried not to feel left out when, on the highway below...
Click for full article
Book Review: "Deep Creek, Finding Hope In The High Country" by Pam Houston, FINE LIFESTYLES SANTA FE & ALBUQUERQUE
Pam Houston has been called "the rodeo queen of American letters" and with good cause. Her memoir, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country, about living on her 120-acre homestead in Creede, Colorado, four hours north of Santa Fe, is a deeply felt...
Click for full article
Book Review: "One Blade Of Grass" by Henry Shukman, FINE LIFESTYLES SANTA FE & ALBUQUERQUE
In his deeply honest chronicle "One Blade Of Grass: Finding the Old Road of the Heart, A Zen Memoir," author Henry Shukman traces his life path from anxious English teenager to travel writer to Zen teacher who now runs...
Click for full article
Book Review: "Residue" by Michael McGarrity, FINE LIFESTYLES SANTA FE & ALBUQUERQUE
With the recently released "Residue," New York Times bestselling author Michael McGarrity returns to his New Mexico-based mystery series revolving around fictional former police chief...
Click for full article
Book Review: "Desert Chrome" by Kathryn Wilder, FINE LIFESTYLES SANTA FE & ALBUQUERQUE
She's lived on Maui. In Arizona and California. Finally, in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, where connecting with horses--especially wild mustangs--has helped Kathryn Wilder ground herself and come to terms with...
Click for full article
"Great Trips: Experience Indian Market in Santa Fe," COWBOYS & INDIANS
As Santa Fe opens up again and Indian Market returns in person (August 21-22), this favorite New Mexico mountain town is fine-tuning its comeback. Offerings...
www.cowboysindians.com/2021/07/experience-indian-market-in-santa-fe/
"Sweet Jane,” MOVIELINE
He’s off doing Terrence Malick’s World War II epic “The Thin Red Line” now, but until that film comes out, one would be justified in taking Thomas Jane for a guy who falls naturally into edgy, contemporary sex-and-drugs roles. He starred as beat-hero-of-self-indulgence Neal Cassady in “The Last Time I Committed Suicide,” then went on to play the coke dealer who blows the big rip-off in “Boogie Nights”…
Click for full article
“Bigger & Better,” MOVIELINE
Everything you hear or read about director Michael Bay claims that everything about him is bigger and better than the next guy. There’s his 200-pound mastiff, his brawny black GMC Yukon, his snazzed-up Nike commercials, his deal at Fox for the upcoming FBI series “Quantico,” and—most importantly—his big-budget, big-screen hits: “The Rock,” box office $332 million worldwide, and “Armageddon,” $430 million worldwide and still counting. There’s also…
Click for full article
Napa Valley photographed by Ugi K.
