Out and Gone on the Left Coast
Conflict is abuse, harm is heteroglossic, and other phantasmagoria from an Oakland Sunday…
Trump’s War Against the Media
Trump knows that his real enemy is the media—less so the weak Democratic Party. We should not underrate his intelligence in this respect. In other words, his war is against fact and truth. If he wins the war (he needs only to win his constituency, a minority in the country and a majority in the swing states), his administration is secure.
Brexit Dreams and Brexit Nightmares
Adapted from the 17th annual Bozeman Lecture at Sarah Lawrence College.
I Love Dick
Jill Soloway’s TV series I Love Dick is based on the autofiction by Chris Kraus. In Soloway’s version, everything is peeled away but a woman’s desire, and no one knows what to do with it. The woman burns. It is a job and a career move.
Among Women
Growing up I used to have a dream…not of being President, or rich, or famous. The dream I had was sinister. Its props were a slide and stairs and landings. In the dream I would take the stairs to the slide then ride down the slide and at the bottom step off onto a landing only to find another slide. I would sit down on it and continue into the depths, ever deeper…
Edmund Gosse’s “Father and Son”: A Road-map for Disbelievers
The kind of fundamentalist school I went to churns out two kinds of individuals: super-Christians—with gleaming smiles surgically implanted on their faces—and drug addicts. I’m exaggerating, of course, but only slightly.
My Meeting
“Why is there evil in the world?” the Zen Master was asked, and answered, “To thicken the plot.”
In Santa Monica I attended a Sunday evening Al Anon meeting. Al Anon is one of a spectrum of meetings based on the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and it’s specifically directed to those of us who are involved with either recovering or practicing alcoholics or addicts. One may be involved by family, marriage, friendship, work or other circumstance, but the involvement is what qualifies each of us for the meeting and brings us to it. It’s what we talk about, in a variety of ways as great as our numbers.
A Prayer for America
As Trump tries to pivot to the G.O.P.’s agenda, Rev. Barber’s May prayer remains right on time.
Putin and Fellow Travelers
In a previous article here, I took on what I called “Trumpism on the Left” with a focus on Stephen Cohen’s defense of the Trump-Putin bromance in The Nation magazine. A friend of mine suggested that the title of the article should have been “The Strange Case of Stephen Cohen,” implying perhaps that “Trumpism on the Left” was an unjustified generalization from a single example. Cohen, as I noted fleetingly, is not alone in his affinity for Putin and by extension Trump. What my piece lacked was the context of other advocates of the two leaders, which I try to provide in what follows.
Skipping Stones
Posts from the first one hundred days…
Destruction is desired. Chaos, a tantrum shitstorm in the face of a massive cultural turn to increased freedom for all.
Coming Out
He says he’s got the vision thing
His brain is like a TV show
A madder, badder, sadder king
If he should lose his mind how would we know
[Full Lyrics Below]
White Folks Love Kendrick Lamar
Out in the Midwest, the Default don’t provide much connection to Black Culture. The barrier’s mostly cultural I’ll admit, but I’d like to suggest the geographical plays a part as well. Bumping bass amidst corn fields and moldering barns just feels mostly lonely. To “get” hip-hop you really got to put some work in.
Cowgirl, Cowboy
ooh ooh ooh weep padoo,
ooh ooh ooh wooop padoo
ooh ooh, ooh
ooh ooh ooh weep padoo
singing their cowboy song
Cowboy couldn’t believe Emmy Lou sang that song. He’d thought it was a throw-away – though he’d found it infectious beginning age six – from a cowboy compilation record with a wild west lasso cover, and lyrics remembered as the kid heard it: not “cattle call,” but “cowboy song,” and maybe he heard it right.
What America Looks Like
The first two days of the Trump administration, complete with swearing in and swearing.
In Memory of Mrs. Edith Jones
For years, I’d meet our neighbor, Mrs. Edith Jones, a few blocks from home, and she’d be hauling more bags than it was humanly possible to carry.