Michael Brod
Tuition
The plan was to buy a Land Rover and spend three months traveling in Europe, Turkey and North Africa. It would take the money earmarked for my tuition to carry it off. So there was a sub-plan – a way to recoup the money with a victimless crime – to import some exotic hashish and Berber marijuana. We would be taking our dog Tina, a Siberian Husky with champion bloodlines. She had to be properly crated in order to fly with the other live animals that the airlines transport and that got me thinking, “I might be clever enough to build the perfect crate, one that would hold more than just the dog.” I felt compelled by the times to take the risk.
Getting Your Gun Off
They don’t call themselves the Proud Boys for nothing. Post-teen to middle-aged men gather in the woods. They dress in camouflage. They are armed with the latest in assault weapons. They carry knives. Are they protecting their right to bear arms, as the NRA would have them believe, or are they assembled to mimic a pubescent rite of passage? The symbolism strikes me as too potent to ignore.
Faith in Smith
One afternoon the mid-sixties my soon-to-be wife and I were in Seattle visiting Hazel, her old Graduate Art School advisor when, in the late afternoon, there was a knock at the front door. “Get that would you please, Michael?” Hazel asked. “Diane’s there. She has a fish for us”. Diane, the student at the door, was clearly of Mediterranean decent and so beautiful that I caught my breath. “Hi”, she said, “this is for Hazel. Tell her that I can’t stay because I have a few more fish to deliver.” On that she turned and went down the stairs to the street. I closed the door and stared at the salmon wrapped in wet newspaper that Diane’s boyfriend had just caught a few hours earlier in Elliot Bay.
Sometime later when I finally met Jim Smith he was working as a shipwright and had this small boat he fished off of in the waters of Elliot Bay, and its surrounds, which formed the liquid edge of downtown Seattle.
The first thing I remember about Jim was his apology. He would begin many conversations with people he didn’t know by apologizing for having such a common name. The irony was that he was one of the most uncommon guys I’d ever met.
Farewell Tour
I caught the 9:15 morning flight from JFK to Burbank, California. The purpose of this trip was to visit a place where a great friend had died and to see other old friends who were under attack by Cancer and age-related conurbations. I anticipated a grim but necessary experience. Since I’d begun to accept the notion of my own mortality, I wanted to know how old friends were facing the end of the line.
Philip Roth’s Ups and Downs (Blake Bailey’s Biography)
Helen Frankenthaler once mused that “artists were like cockroaches, for them everything was grist for the mill…” Philip Roth’s grist came from his close observation of people in his orbit and the world at large. But mostly it came from his own life which he constantly chewed up and regurgitated as fiction until the line between the two blurred.
Biopolitics (Fascism 2020)
Fascism has always been with the species.
Search for a Method (Vote by Phone)
Many years ago Buckminster Fuller, one of the greatest thinkers, engineers, and observers of life in all its micro and macro forms, suggested that democracy could be expressed more efficiently if people were allowed to vote by phone.
Inequality & Two Cheers for Capitalism
In these days of pandemic isolation, as the world reels from one gut punch to the next, the future looks anything but rosy. While the monied float on their yachts and in their two million dollar isolation rentals in the Hampton’s, the rest of us live in fear and anxiety.
A Crime Against Humanity
Have the majority of Americans reached their tipping point? The trials of so many of Trump’s accomplices have yet to get under way and it will be months before the final report by Robert Mueller and his investigators is published. (Does anyone have any idea how many lawsuits against Trump and his policies are working their way through state and federal courts? The cumulative fees will be staggering by the time the cases are decided.) Patience may be a foundational democratic virtue but what if we’re in the midst of a cold civil war? Maxine Waters seems right on. The time for civility-mongering is past.
Children’s Crusade III
This March For Our Lives and the global response to it is unique.
Requiem For a Not-So-Heavyweight: Hockney at the Met
David Hockney is a master conjurer of placid images and what such images conjure.
The Shape of Things to Come
There are no excuses…forced, non-negotiated sexual encounters are repugnant. Promises of career advancement or threats of career derailment used as a weapon in a war of desire, are repugnant. All such behaviors are repugnant. What about lesser transgressions?