Notes on a Diabetic Body

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Sugar Time

I’m alone one night watching Field of Dreams on TV. As my blood sugar drifts down, the movie becomes more and more profound. Death isn’t the end! We’re too bounded by reason to catch the shafts of light all around us! I look up from the screen at the living room. The bookcase is swaying, the arm chair mumbling quietly to itself. My hands are attached to long, rubbery strips, and the hairs on my arms, light brown and silky, are beautiful and mysteriously meaningful. A drop of sweat runs down my forehead, splashes onto my thigh, and ripples out on the surface of a pool. And I think—slowly and with a dangerous smile—I’m having a really low blood sugar.

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Hey Ho, Let’s Go

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One critic said that British punks sang anger, Americans, pain. But punk was more than emotion, more than the sense of humor the Ramones brought to the mix, more than the adrenaline rush of a live show, more than the aura of sex around everything.

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La La Land: The Loneliness of The Long-Distance Egotist

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The fetishization of the past is inevitable in a society where virtually no work of pop culture goes unmemorialized and hack creatives can shamelessly co-opt the iconography of cultural landmarks to shine reflected glory on their anemic pastiches. In La La Land, Damien Chazelle really really really wants you to think about classic Hollywood musicals, but not too closely.

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Eminent Domain

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It was a raw winter night in Greenwich Village in 1978.    I was tending bar at Bradley’s, a now long gone, legendary saloon on University Place that featured the best piano jazz on the planet.  The supremely gifted veteran, Jimmy Rowles, was at the keyboard, Sam Jones was playing bass, and all was right with the world.  I loved my job because I loved the music. 

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Canciones Para Puerto Rico

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Chatter about “Almost Like Praying”–the song Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote and recorded to benefit hurricane relief efforts in Puerto Rico–reminded your editor of this performance by the brothers Palmieri and salsero Ismael Quintana…

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Fit to Print

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Last week, The New York Times ran a strange story about Louis C.K., whose comedy walks an artful line between insight and indecency. The piece cited “unsubstantiated internet rumors of his sexual misconduct with female comics.” I call this story strange because of that word–unsubstantiated. Substantiation is the essence of good reporting. You don’t print what you can’t pin down. But at the Times, this standard is changing, at least when it comes to allegations of sexual abuse. Hearsay is permissible, as long as women are doing the saying.

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“Wild and Blue”: Celeste Dupuy-Spencer’s Populist Visions of America

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Celeste Dupuy-Spencer has been painting up a storm. The artist told art blogger Brienne Walsh she usually takes 6 months to a year and a half to finish a picture but for “Wild and Blue,” her first solo show in New York (which runs until October 7th at the Marlborough Contemporary Gallery), she only had the summer and the “paintings just got ripped out of me.” More than a few of her pictures hint at hurricane weather. And Dupuy-Spencer, who’s lived in New Orleans (though she’s based in L.A. now), knows from floods of feeling. Pictures like Cajun Navy and Lake Pontchartrain look back to Katrina’s aftermath but are all up in this time of climate change.

Cajun Navy

LakeDupuy-Spencer is “painting the news” as one reviewer has written in New Republic, citing her picture of the Confederate monument torn down last month in Durham, which “amounts to a kind of monument to the search for social justice.”

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Confessions of an Unwitting Disciple of Meir Kahane[1]

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Hay sólo dos países: el de los sanos y el de los enfermos/por un tiempo se puede gozar de doble nacionalidad/pero, a la larga, eso no tiene sentido. -Enrique Lihn
 

A brother-writer has been pumping iron and taking boxing lessons ever since Trump won. He’s Jewish (with a Latin tinge).
 

An oasis of fascism in a desert of liberalism…

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Mancunian Lincoln

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Mancunian Lincoln

It seems like maybe we could all use a good story about a civil war statue, a good story about an American President, and a good story about the power of the common people against the rich and powerful, so I’m going to start with this one. It’s probably for the best that you’re reading this here because I haven’t managed to tell this story in person without crying.

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Know Your Enemy

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Trump knew what he was doing with this “both sides” shit. If you think it’s irreparably damaged his presidency, I humbly suggest you not judge too quickly. Here’s why: That neo-Nazis and white supremacists exist in America has been generally acknowledged for a long time. News reports about them have been popping up for decades; Edward Norton and Ryan Gosling (to name just two) have played skinheads in movies. But almost everyone could see that Charlottesville was different. Nearly everyone wanted to know what accounted for that difference.

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The Middle of the Journey 2.0

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A brother-writer has been pumping iron and taking boxing lessons ever since Trump won. He’s Jewish (with a Latin tinge). I’m not. And that’s probably on point. The threat posed by those who chant “Jews Will Not Replace Us” may be more visceral for him than it is for me.

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