Excerpted from “How the Revolution Started: Essays and Impertinent Thoughts.” If you voluntarily buy burritos from Chipotle or pay for TV programs owned by Discovery, companies whose CEOs earn 1,000 times more than the average employee they oversee, then you probably don’t have any problem with wealth and income inequality. You’re certainly not going to...
We don’t author our biographies. We sculpt them, chipping and chiseling, peeling back the onionskin strata accretions of time, calcified history. The layers of remaindered remnants. What’s been piled on previous to our arrival taunts just beyond our reach, like the inscrutable object of desire who can’t and will not ever requite our boundless love....
If you’re the kind of chappie who believes in predestination, a Calvinist narrative to be unspooled one frame at a time, this poem is not for you. If you are the kind of lassie who believes in free will, a steadfastly laissez-faire Locked fantasy to be imagined and enlivened one moment at a time, this...
Here’s a list of several countries: Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, and the United Arab Emirates. What do they all have in common – besides being among the worst human rights offenders on the planet? Their enthusiastic embrace of American values? Their love of liberty and freedom of speech? Here’s a list of several financial institutions:...
All is well. If you can avoid televised singing contests (among other depressing purveyors of nicely packaged sweet nothings), you realize that music, genuinely new and never heard-before music, is being composed and produced and distributed at unprecedented levels. So much of it is good — in all that imprecise word’s manifestations. There’s the straight-ahead virtuosity...
How low has the United States of America sunk? We’re in the process of negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran. Yes, negotiating, like, talking with. Iran. Yes, that Iran. The country that once held Americans hostage. The country that fought against Saddam Hussein back when we liked him. The country that arms Hezbollah and Hamas....
EXCERPTED FROM “How The Revolution Started: Essays & Impertinent Thoughts “(Eggy Press). …and to conclude, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission makes the following findings and recommendations. + Capitalism has been an interesting experiment which has now ended. We must identify a better organizing principle than greed. + Those who have aspired to the crimes of...
You seem really nice. I like you. I don’t know if we’re into the same stuff or anything, but you’re really fun to talk to. I can see why people say you’re adorable and easy-to-get-along-with. Do I seem like a nice person to you? I’m passionate, that’s for sure! You know, I strongly support the death penalty...
The new recording from KAZE, a Japanese-French quartet — drums, piano, two trumpets — reminds us that all music is noise. Some noise, it seems, sounds better than others. On Uminari (a low frequency hum rising from the sea), the usual hallmarks of through-composed music (meter, melody, harmony) aren’t exactly absent, they’re just not terribly important....
Some of our more famously progressive friends — those who self-identify as conscious, liberal, rights-minded pacifists, including “smartest man in the world” comedian Greg Proops – are presently in a political pickle. They’ve pre-declared themselves as Soldiers for Hillary, despite so many stains upon her record you might be persuaded that she was a key...
Hope RekindledThis past week has given us more hope for our diseased republic than any other time in 50+ years of paying attention. Observing and participating in a long-overdue peaceful uprising, occupying the streets, feeling the righteous energy of people of all ages, colors, faiths, and wealth (or lack thereof), has…
Clarinetist Glenn Dickson, master of klezmer, has made a solo recording, “Wider Than the Sky,” that’s been on perpetual repeat at our home office. Using over-dubs and electronic digital effects, Dickson fills the aural soundscape with a rich melange of chordal textures supporting the melody. His celebrated virtuosity is subsumed here to long, elegiac musical...
