Christopher Sandford

Latest by Christopher Sandford in Chronicles

• Correspondence

  August 2020

  Seattle's Summer of Hate

  9 ¼ min

  The Summer of Love signified an experiment in unfettered freedom of expression and peaceful self-rule which seemed to promise great things then. It bears little resemblance to the scenes on Seattle’s Capitol Hill as I have recently experienced them.

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• Correspondence

  January 2020

  Is Seattle Dying?

  13 ¼ min

  Not long ago, I found myself sitting one sunny Friday afternoon in the Unity Museum in Seattle, notebook in hand, as a group of fresh-faced college undergraduates participated in a debate over whether or not their city is dying. The general conclusion of the affair and the grim message of the students was that it is indeed.

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• Society & Culture

  January 2019

  Lost and Found in America

  7 ¾ min

  One Saturday night last summer I found myself sitting on a warm, grassy knoll outside Missoula, Montana, watching a blood-red sun set behind a cup in the hills with the snow-fringed Bitterroot Mountains beyond, while in the foreground an elfin, 70-year-old man dressed entirely in black leather, accompanied by an energetically hair-swinging band, blasted out a heavily amplified song called “Feed My Frankenstein.”

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• Reviews

  September 2018

  Ask Jeeves

  10 min

  Some of the best-loved characters in English literature are observed only dimly through the eyes of an unreliable first-person narrator; like fish seen through the glass of a tank, they swim toward us, momentarily dazzling in their colors, before receding again into the murk.

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• Society & Culture

  February 2018

  American Artisan

  6 min

  Whenever Robert Valade embarked on a commissioned piece, or simply took his hammer and chisel to cut an exquisitely fashioned design into a gift for a friend, he first bowed his large head and prayed to God to help him finish the job right.

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• Blog

  January 8, 2018

  Gone to Pot

  10 ¼ min

  It is seven o’clock on a peaceful late-summer evening here in suburban Seattle, and I’m sitting in my back garden smoking marijuana.

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• Blog

  December 4, 2017

  To See and to Speak

  17 ¾ min

  Most retrospectives take the Swinging Sixties, and more particularly Swinging London, on their own terms. “Society was shaken to its foundations!” a 2011 BBC documentary on the subject shouted.

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• Society & Culture

  October 2017

  Khrushchev and Me

  6 ½ min

  Around 50 years ago Basil D’Oliveira, a South African-born, olive-skinned professional cricketer who emigrated to England and qualified to play for his adopted home’s national team, was as controversial a sportsman in his way as Muhammad Ali, or Tommie Smith and John Carlos, or even the NFL’s cretinous Colin Kaepernick today.

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• Correspondence

  August 2017

  The Cottingley Fairies, and Fatima

  15 ¾ min

  Arthur Conan Doyle once wrote that the idea of an acceptable form of public entertainment underwent a rude shock in the years around World War I. By then in his mid-50’s, he had abandoned any pretense of sympathy for modern culture.

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• Blog

  May 25, 2017

  True Grit

  9 ¾ min

  A remark one often hears from the current crop of film critics is that John Wayne might indeed merit the iconographic status conferred on him by tens of millions of ordinary cinemagoers around the world, were it not for the troubling matter of his alleged evasion of military service during World War II.

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• Correspondence

  April 2017

  Sicced on Citizens

  11 ¾ min

  Nowadays, the federal government is the closest thing many Americans have to a religion, with those employed by it regarding themselves as a priesthood. Blind faith, if not dependency, tends to take over from observation.

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• Correspondence

  March 2017

  The Satan Club

  5 ¾ min

  It is often said that our nation’s social-engineering laws are for the most part well intentioned, and that only in their local application do they seem to pander so brazenly to the obsessed or the lunatic.

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• Correspondence

  February 2017

  Sounds of the Sixties

  13 min

  To address the main question first: Yes, they really can. That’s the definitive answer to America’s burning cultural debate of the 1960’s about whether or not the Monkees could actually play their musical instruments.

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• Society & Culture

  January 2017

  Our Progressive Sexual Apartheid

  4 ½ min

  I recently attended a rock concert where the headline act—an artful blend of political correctness and antic comedy dressed in a leopard-skin overcoat under a silver wig—lectured us at some length on the need to respect women.

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• Correspondence

  December 2016

  Gone to Pot

  10 ¼ min

  It is seven o’clock on a peaceful late-summer evening here in suburban Seattle, and I’m sitting in my back garden smoking marijuana. Passively smoking, I should add, lest I shock any reader by this sorry lapse, but smoking nonetheless.

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• Correspondence

  October 2016

  Pomp and Circumstance

  14 min

  As a nation, Britain has become accustomed to marking milestones in the reign of Elizabeth II.

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• Society & Culture

  July 2016

  The Sentinel

  18 ¼ min

  “Don’t mention the war,” my grandfather told me a few minutes before our guest, an old friend from the Business Administration faculty at the nearby university, joined us for lunch.

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• Correspondence

  May 2016

  Sizing Up the Feline Uproar

  10 ½ min

  In London recently, I found that many of the locals had stayed up until the early hours of a wet Monday morning to watch Super Bowl 50 on television, and judging from the T-shirts being paraded around town there seems to be a particular groundswell of support among British youth for the 49ers, the Cowboys, and the Redskins, names all richly evocative of the American frontier experience.

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• Correspondence

  March 2016

  EMP (“Are You Experienced?”)

  4 ¼ min

  Is rock music truly an art? This question has never met with a straightforward answer, either by the musicians themselves or the many who venerate them, and it hangs over the massive bulk of the Experience Music Project and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame here in Seattle.

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• Society & Culture

  January 2016

  The Future of Publishing

  17 ¼ min

  In 2004, a middle-aged English businessman named George Courtauld decided to put together a slim, illustrated album for his three young sons. It was called The Pocket Book of Patriotism.

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