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.

Las Vegas (AP) — Former state lawmaker Jim Marchant won the Republican nomination for Nevada secretary of state on Monday, bringing one of the state’s most outspoken promoters of election conspiracy theories within reach of the office that oversees voting in a perennial presidential battleground.

His win after Nevada’s June 9 primary sets up a rematch in November with Democratic Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, who prevailed in their race four years ago.

The winner will oversee the 2028 presidential election in Nevada, a state that went for President Donald Trump in 2024 after voting for Democrat Joe Biden four years earlier.

Marchant has long questioned Nevada’s voting security. He claimed both he and Trump were victims of election fraud in 2020 when Marchant lost his bid for Nevada’s 4th Congressional District against Democratic Rep. Steven Horsford, despite officials finding no evidence of any widespread fraud.

He claimed that mail ballots were fraudulent, despite using that method to vote while he was a registered voter in Florida.

In December 2020, he stood alongside the six Nevada Republicans who signed fake electoral certificates claiming Trump won the state — when in fact Biden won Nevada that year by more than 33,000 votes. Those six Republicans continue to face charges filed by the attorney general’s office.

The Nevada secretary of state at the time, a Republican, had her office review multiple claims of fraud submitted by Republicans and found them to be baseless or already under review, specifically refuting thousands of allegations. An Associated Press investigation of potential fraud cases in the six battleground states where Trump disputed his 2020 loss found fewer than 475 overall, far too few to affect the election. In Nevada, the number of possible voter fraud cases represented less than 0.3% of Biden’s margin of victory in the state.

Marchant defeated Gov. Joe Lombardo’s endorsed candidate for secretary of state, Shirley Folkins-Roberts, who had denied there was widespread fraud in Nevada’s elections, and former lawmaker Sharron Angle. Folkins-Roberts conceded the race in a Monday statement.

“Despite being massively outspent in this election, I’m proud to again be chosen by Nevada conservatives to be their champion in the race for Secretary of State,” Marchant said in a statement.

Marchant reported raising and spending no money ahead of the primary. Folkins-Roberts reported spending about $11,000, and Angle reported $20,000 this year, according to the latest campaign finance reports.

If elected, Marchant wants to eliminate electronic voting machines and end the state’s universal mail ballots. He also wants to require paper ballots, which would be counted by hand, according to his campaign website.

Aguilar, who ran unopposed in the Democratic primary, has promoted his efforts to streamline Nevada’s election processes and improve voter turnout. He also highlighted a bill he successfully helped steer through the Legislature that makes it a felony to harass election officials.

During his tenure, Aguilar spearheaded a transition to a new voter registration and election management system and in 2024 organized a polling location at Allegiant Stadium.

In his statement, Marchant called his win a “victory for voter ID.” He is a staunch supporter of implementing voter ID, a ballot question that passed by a wide margin in 2024 and will be before voters again in November. Aguilar has previously said voter ID is a solution to a problem that does not exist, but also said he respects the will of the voters and will work with the governor and local election officials “to continue strengthening our elections.”

Aguilar’s campaign declined to comment about Marchant’s victory in the GOP primary.