Whether Jack London set his stories in the harsh Yukon winter, the savage beauty of south Pacific islands, or contemporary American society, his insight into human behavior keeps them compelling now. That was the attraction behind the latest effort to convert London’s fiction to film.

Burning Daylight is set in 1920s New York, but it was actually shot entirely in and around Toronto. Writer-Director Sanzhar Sultanov says his hometown made a good stand-in for the Big Apple.

There will be a special preview screening of Burning Daylight Monday, August 9 at  7 pm at the Sebastiani Theater in Sonoma, as a benefit for the Jack London Foundation. Sultanov will be present for a question and answer session after the film is shown. Advance tickets can be purchased here. Watch the trailer for Burning Daylight:

Thirty-four years after Christo’s  Running Fence snaked across the North Bay’s coastal landscape into the Pacific, the unique and short-lived artwork is still fondly recalled by most of those who played a part in its creation.

The large and unexpected projects envisioned and executed by Christo and Jeanne-Claude may not fit some conventional definitions of art, says documentary filmmaker Wolfram Hissen, but they certainly strike a chord with a huge number of people.

Some of the friendships that developed during the Running Fence project proved to be deep and enduring, Hissen discovered, despite the broad differences between the artists and the ranchers.

After the Running Fence was taken down, each landowner got to keep the materials that had been part of it. Some used the poles and  hardware in other construction projects, while the thousands of yards of while canvass was generally harder to reuse. One exception ot that was this jacket, made by Amelia Bruhn, and shown at the 33 year anniversary gathering in 2009 that became a substantial part of Wolfram Hissen's new documentary. See the trailer for the film below:

In addition to the showing tonight in Occidental, The Running Fence Revisited will also be screened on the evenings of June 24 and 25 at the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa.

Climbing up a sheer rock wall just your feet, fingers, and a pouch of chalk may not be your idea of a good time, but that’s what Kevin Jorgeson (above) lives to do.

Bouldering doesn’t require much in the way of equipment. The two essentials, Kevin Jorgeson explains, are the “crash pads” that are laid out at the base of the boulder, and some specialized shoes.

This sort of extreme rock climbing isn’t just about steep, near vertical ascents. Sometimes, as in the picture at the top of this page, the routes become almost horizontal. Kevin explains how that’s done.

In addition to his own exploits, Jorgeson is committed to sharing his interest in the sport, and to that end he has formed a new nonprofit and is working toward creating a climbing center based in Sonoma.

You can find photographs and videos of some of Kevin's more dramatic climbs on his website. You can also see him in the new documentary film, Core, which will have special preview screenings, with Kevin in attendance, Monday evening April 26 at the Sebastiani Theater in Sonoma, and Tuesday night, April 27 at the Rialto in Santa Rosa. See the trailer for Core below.

Empathy, not self-interest, is the core impulse of human nature, according to social analyst Jeremy Rifkin. And that realization may hold the key to successfully responding to the environmental and economic challenges that now confront humanity.

One key to recent scientific research relating to empathy is the discovery of  “mirror neurons,” a finding that originated, Rifkin relates, in a chance encounter during some unreleated experiments with monkeys in an Italian laboratory.

Jeremy Rifkin (right) will speak on The Empathic Civilization, The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, at the Sonoma Community Center in Sonoma on Sunday afternoon, jANUARY 24, at 4 pm, an event hosted by the Praxis Peace Institute.