UPDATE – JUNE 16, 10:57 p.m.:

Nearly 69,981 NV Energy customers were without power Tuesday evening across Reno, parts of the North Valleys, the northwest area and as far south as Washoe Valley as crews investigated a widespread outage.

The outage also includes previously reported impacts in Sparks, according to NV Energy outage information.

The cause of the outages is listed as unknown and under investigation.

It is not immediately known whether the outage is related to fire-related deactivation in parts of east Sparks or if it is a separate incident.

Additional information was not immediately available.

ORIGINAL STORY – JUNE 16:

More than 8,100 NV Energy customers are without power in parts of Sparks as a vegetation fire in east Sparks continues to burn.

NV Energy listed the cause of the outage as unknown and under investigation, affecting ZIP codes 89431, 89434 and 89436.

NV Energy has deactivated power in the area due to the fire, according to Sparks Fire Department in an online post.

The fire is burning in the area of Geno Martini Parkway and Garda Court and has prompted evacuation orders for the Vecchio Drive area.

An evacuation shelter has been set up at the Sparks Library on 12th Street for residents impacted by the fire.

The situation remains active and is a developing story. Additional information was not immediately available.

I filmed on a burn on Harmony Ridge, above Nevada City yesterday with a newish private company called ‘[First Rain Land Stewardship](https://www.firstrainlandstewardship.com/)’. They run a thinning crew out of Nevada City and the owner is a CARX California State-Certified Burn Boss. I wanted to cover this burn because with all of the media attention on Cal Fire’s Putah Creek escaped burn last week, and after months of doomer ‘*2026 will be the worst fire season ever*’ reporting, it seems like many people are really anxious about the upcoming season, but that we aren’t really there, yet. Also, I feel like we need to push into burning WHENEVER THE CONDITIONS ARE APPROPRIATE, regardless of calendar dates.

We broadcast burned about 13 acres of mixed conifer that had been thinned last summer by First Rain. They had burned some of the piles last winter, but about 2/3 of the unit still had piles in it. Some of the piles were pretty large, but all of them burned down to the heavies within 10-15 minutes. The woods on the other sides of the property lines were scary-thick with heavy cedar reprod and needlecast manzanita (see photo 2, below)!

We had about 15 people which included the First Rain crew, 4 people from the new Nevada City Fuels Crew (paid out of a local bond measure), one person from the Nevada County RCD, and a couple guys from North San Juan VFD (?). Many of the people on the burn had previous firefighting and logging experience.

It got up into the 90s after lunch, but RHs stayed above 30% and we remained in prescription. There was not much wind or lift, so we got shaded a bit by our own smoke for most of the day. We had roads around about 1/2 of the burn, and a hoselay around the rest. We had 4 or 5 Type VI engines and a couple water trailers. All of the un-roaded lines were well burned-in by the time it heated up in the afternoon.

The duff was dry all the way down to mineral soil, but there was quite a bit of greenery in the forbs and grasses. The terrain was complex, due to lots of old mining disturbance, so they backed fire off all the little ridges between the old gullies, and got really good consumption on the duff and litter. There were a lot of piles in the gullies, and the heat from these may have killed some of the residual trees in the tighter gullies. It was freaking hot in there, and the heat lasted for a long time. It was a reminder that in our heaviest thickets, in places we can’t operate mechanically, removing fuels is really difficult – with the volume of overstocking we are facing in many places, pile burning can result in high mortality, even if you burn in the winter.

One benefit of having all the heat from the piles was that we got good indrafts to the center of the units, and there wasn’t much smoke for the holding crews.

Yesterday was the first day of the burn permit suspension in NEU. This project was done under a land management exemption, signed by the Unit Duty Officer.

By Steve Erickson

A Cornish folk-horror reverie where sound and image eclipse story, evoking the erosion of community and the fragility of working-class life.

Rose of Nevada, directed by Mark Jenkin. A special advance screening at Coolidge Corner Theatre on June 23 will feature a post-film discussion with the filmmaker.

To its credit, Rose of Nevada sustains a mood of eerie alienation. The film’s shots seem disconnected, the narrative’s characters trapped in the square frame of the Academy ratio. Cornish director and writer Mark Jenkin shoots and edits in a manner that emphasizes people’s isolation from one another: his cuts don’t neatly suture a story together. Rather, images collide into one another. There is a thematic logic to the approach: the visuals reflect the death of communal spirit in contemporary England.  Jenkin set out quite consciously to achieve these strange effects. His cinematography was hand-cranked 16mm. Subliminal mismatches between actors and their voices were exploited because the sound is entirely post-synced. Rose of Nevada continues the aesthetic of Jenkin’s 2022 feature Enys Men (Arts Fuse review) which brought elements of the experimental avant-garde into conversation with British folk-horror.

Set in a fishing village in Cornwall, England, Rose of Nevada is named after a boat. The vessel mysteriously vanished 30 years ago. When it reappears out of the blue,  reasonable explanations for its reappearance are scarce. Struggling to support his  family in an economically shattered region, Nick (George MacKay) takes a job serving as one of its crew, alongside Liam (Callum Turner). The ship offers a number of ominous portents, including a message carved into the wall. When Nick and Liam emerge from the boat, thinking they’ve headed back home, they find that they have gone through a time loop and returned to 1993. They’re accepted by the townsfolk of the past — because they pretend to be the men who vanished.

“Kneebone Barton,” a track from Rose of Nevada’s soundtrack, features a ship’s horn that unfurls into faint, seemingly endless echoes. Heard on its own, the film’s score, composed by Jenkin, evokes a mood of chilly loneliness, rendering the the story’s fascination with time’s mysteries legible, even without its images. By foregoing live recording, Jenkin crafts an extraordinarily vivid soundscape in which ordinary noises resolve into musical rhythms. Life aboard the ship takes on the cadence of a drum solo—utensils slam against the walls, boots tap in steady patterns. In place of an alarm clock, the captain rouses Nick and Liam by striking a metal pot.

Jenkin, who was also the cinematographer, is enamored with signs of both life and decay. His camera glides over rusted metal and rotting wood, drawing out the beauty in their mottled surfaces. Visually, Rose of Nevada skillfully echoes images from its early passages—a house’s crumbling roof that lets water flood in, foreshadowing events aboard the boat. Day after day, a seagull circles in the bright blue sky above, as if caught in its own loop. The director emphasizes the medium’s focus on physicality, the tangible reality of the narrative’s environments. To that end, he leaves imperfections intact: flashes of light briefly render an actor’s face unreadable, and the beginnings and ends of reels have been left visible at times in the final cut. The soundtrack’s artificiality pulls against the material grain of the images, creating a provocative tension.

The director has long been devoted to filming the Cornish seaside in southern England. His commitment to elevating the region’s culture was recognized by the College of Bards of Gorsedh Kernow. For the first time, in Rose of Nevada, Jenkin introduces introduces recognizable movie stars into his work. But both MacKay and Turner strategically  underplay their roles, choosing to recede into their characters rather than assert themselves over lesser-known performers in the cast. Jenkin’s spare script only heightens this demand for restraint.

Jenkin’s turn toward horror has also made his recent films more commercially viable. Distributed by Neon, Enys Men reached American multiplexes—a surprising push for such a singular work. Rose of Nevada, by contrast, sustains a similarly eerie atmosphere but eschews an easily legible narrative. Character recedes in favor of the sensuous force of sound and image. As in his earlier films, Jenkin explores the precariousness of working-class life, though he avoids the blunt metaphors common to much A24 horror. Instead, he relies on the medium’s considerable affective power to evoke the fragility of blue-collar existence. That said, Rose of Nevada is less a story than an assertion of sustained mood—an exceptionally potent one.

Steve Erickson writes about film and music for Gay City News, Slant Magazine, the Nashville Scene, Trouser Press, and other outlets. He also produces electronic music under the tag callinamagician. His latest album, Bells and Whistles, was released in January 2024, and is available to stream here. He presents a biweekly freeform radio show, Radio Not Radio, featuring an eclectic selection of music from around the world.