The other day I met up with an old friend in downtown LA and visited the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). The exhibition was called “Monuments” and featured a dozen or so statues that had […]
Academia / Culture / Literature / Politics / Technology
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Books Will Abide, Though Readers May Not
James Marriott’s essay on the “dawn of the post-literate society” supports what to me has been evident for over a decade: in the wake of the smartphone, book readership has diminished and so has the […]
Culture / Media / Politics
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The Bad News Is the Good News
I grab the remote and turn on the PBS Newshour. Because I need to catch up on the latest failures of civilization. The scandals, disasters, crimes, wars, abuses of power, class conflict and sundry forms of […]
Class / Culture / Politics
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Are We in Decline Yet? The Wikipedia Page
It’s obvious that the United States is in decline. But what does decline mean? According to Edward Gibbon, it’s a loss of virtue, particularly a decay of public service and civic duty. In the case of the […]
Consumerism / Culture / Labor
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Area Consumer Thinks About Brick and Mortar
Today I went into Staples to buy a ream of paper. I immediately noticed that the store layout was identical to that of every other Staples I’d been in: the red panels and white lettering, […]
Class / Culture / Literature / Politics
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Reflections on the Narrative of Frederick Douglass
Years ago, I heard a passage from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass on Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast. It was in episode 68, “Human Resources.” What impressed me was not only its power […]
Art / Culture / Literature / Poetry
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My Poetry Divorce
Near the end of my 25-year marriage to poetry, a friend jokingly called my books “stocking stuffers.” That was when I stopped questioning what I could do to make poetry more relevant and entertaining and […]
Art / Culture / Media
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Nothing New and Nowhere to Play
Duke Ellington emerged from the Harlem Renaissance, Charlie Parker from the Memphis jazz clubs, Coltrane from the Philadelphia jazz clubs, Chester Burnett from the clubs of West Memphis, before moving to Chicago in the early […]
Culture / Media / Technology
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Reverse-Engineering the Nerd Oligarchy
The other day I was watching Bill Maher’s Club Random, and the guest was tech millionaire and anti-aging geek Bryan Johnson. Part of the conversation was about the apparatus that Johnson wears on his penis […]
Class / Culture / Politics
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Where Are the “Goddamned Liberals” Now?
In 2015, I met a retired lieutenant commander in the United States Navy who had purchased a small townhouse about a block down the road from mine. He was often in the yard doing renovations […]