Articles by Wallace Baine

About Wallace Baine
Wallace Baine is a staff writer for New SV Media with extensive experience covering community arts in the region.

Mr. Rough and Ready

The sky is an alarming swirl of gray and orange. You can’t tell just by looking if it’s day or night. Everything smells burnt. Chaos surrounds you. You’re standing in a parking lot of a WalMart in Clearlake, experiencing firsthand the Mendocino Complex Fire of 2018. Your [...]

Porch song

Before television, before radio, before the hundreds of beguiling distractions that have blessed (and cursed) the American family, there was the front porch. This modest architectural feature of the typical American mid-century home served a distinct purpose. It was the private [...]

Revitalizing tradition

Driving west toward Gilroy on Leavesley Road, the unmarked back side of the Gilroy Premium Outlets appears on the horizon as a fortress, marking a clear boundary between a commercial hive of shopping bags, parking lots and brand names and a much quieter wide-open landscape. Most [...]

Curiously curated cloves

There is no evidence that Scottish-born 19th-century seaman John Gilroy ever tasted garlic. But today, especially in Northern California, his name (and his namesake city) is as deeply linked to the famously odiferous herb as peanut butter is to jelly. You don’t usually think [...]

Caring and repairing

Is there a more fundamentally American ritual than the barn-raising? People banding together to help a neighbor in need is part of the American story that we never get tired of hearing. But in contemporary times, there aren’t a lot of barns to be built or neighbors who heed [...]

Keeping the doors open

It’s tempting to call what independent bookstore owners have dealt with over the last two or three decades a wild and scary roller coaster ride. Problem is, most roller coasters are considerably less wild and scary. Consider the monsters that the indy bookstore owner has had [...]

Sidewalk serenade

They will arrive sometime after the first of July, mother and daughter, in a place reverently known as “Music City,” a place that for a young singer-songwriter from Gilroy might as well be called “Oz.” They will unpack, freshen up, maybe relax a bit. Then, Angelique [...]

Shattered history

It’s a story that was originally intended for an audience of one. And, if all goes according to plan, it could evolve into a story for millions. Armand Baltazar began the book project now known as “Timeless: Diego and the Rangers of the Vastlantic” (Harper Collins) as a [...]

Double fantasy

Each day, after working 9 to 5, Rachelle Abbey has to turn around and then work “9 to 5.” Sure, it sounds like some exhausting and perverse “Groundhog Day” feedback loop, but it’s really nothing like that. It’s more like the glamorous double life of a secret [...]

The trials of Saintjohn

A 10-year-old boy steps off a Greyhound bus in San Jose with his mother. After a trip that took the better part of two days, the boy blinks in the California sun for the first time. He is 1,700 miles away from everything he’s ever known—friends, family, school, everything. [...]
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