PicoBlog

NAPA VALLEY, Calif. — What do you get when you combine 900 acres of verdant oak woodlands with nearly 700 acres of open space, all set alongside a dancing creek? The answer: Moore Creek Park in St. Helena at 2602 Chiles Pope Valley Road next to Lake Hennessey's shores. According to Jay Jessen, Napa County Regional Park and Open Space District park steward and naturalist, the park is open after all of the recent rains, thanks to the hard work of folks like him at NOSD.

THE DOORBELL RINGS and I begin to salivate. The courier hands me the parcel, I can already smell the contents. As I tear it open the aromas intensify - sweet and smoky and woody. I know what I’m going to find because Arantxa my sister in law who lives in the north of Spain, told me they were on their way: piquillos peppers. And not any old piquillos these peppers are from Lodosa in Navarra, where Arantxa lives.

The Beard Foundation annual awards took place last month. As a research project, click on the link to see what won, and read. You might inspire yourself. This year I see awards for The New York Times and New Yorker writers, which is new. High level competition! I listened to The Sporkful’s award-wining podcast, What “Couscousgate” Tells Us About French Food. I learned that some people argue that because the French colonized North African countries, couscous (now ubiquitous in France because of migration), should be considered French.

On February 28, 2024, Disney Plus, the streaming division of Disney Entertainment, premiered Iwájú, an original animated series set in a futuristic Lagos, Nigeria—which it first announced during its Investors Day in 2020. Iwájú, a production of Walt Disney Animation Studios in collaboration with Kugali, a pan-African entertainment company, follows the exciting coming-of-age story of Tola, a young girl from the wealthy island, and her best friend, Kole, a self-taught tech expert, as they discover the secrets and dangers hidden in their different worlds.

As a rule, this column has not concerned itself over much with the hundreds of short films produced by Walt Disney Studios over the years, except for when they’ve turned up in package films like The Many Adventures Of Winnie The Pooh. But I’m making an exception for Mickey’s Christmas Carol. For one thing, Mickey Mouse’s return to the big screen was a legitimately big deal, earning press coverage and being reviewed alongside all the big holiday features in 1983.

More often than not, directors tend to receive the lion’s share of praise (or, if the movie’s lousy, blame) for a film’s success or failure. I’d argue that in some cases, they receive too much credit. But that’s not the case when it comes to live-action Disney movies of the 1960s and 70s. Disney employed several directors during this period, including Robert Stevenson, Robert Butler and the McEveety brothers. A lot of these guys came from television and the Disney House Style reflected that.

For much of the 1980s, Disney President and, as of 1983, CEO Ron Miller had been rolling the dice on movies that did not fit comfortably within the Disney wheelhouse. Projects like Night Crossing, Tron, Tex, Trenchcoat and Something Wicked This Way Comes had little in common apart from how different they all felt from the traditional Disney model. But he evidently could still find room for at least one tried and true genre: the Disney nature film.

Fess Parker was right smack dab in the middle of his Disney contract when Westward Ho The Wagons! was released in December of 1956. Already, signs of boredom had begun to creep in. Given the phenomenal success of Davy Crockett, it’s totally understandable why Walt would want to keep Parker comfortably within his wheelhouse. But there’s a big difference between playing to an actor’s strengths and simply repeating yourself. Apart from his choice of hat, Parker’s character here isn’t all that much different from Davy Crockett or James Andrews in The Great Locomotive Chase.

The new Disney film Wish tells us that when it comes to the universe, we’re all shareholders, but when it comes to Disney itself, we cannot all be categorized into the same group. I have long thought that we can all be placed into four groups regarding the Walt Disney Company. In the first camp, we have the True Believers. These are the people who think that everything Disney does is perfect, that fairy tales are real, dreams always come true, etc.