March 2012
1 post
December 2011
12 posts
How Heavy Metal Saved My Life - by Steve Almond, Virginia Quarterly Review 2005 Copyright University of… http://t.co/UitjVPwZ
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How Heavy Metal Saved My Life
by Steve Almond, Virginia Quarterly Review 2005
Copyright University of Virginia Summer 2005
I spent three years as a rock music critic in El Paso, Texas, which was where I lived at the tail end of the eighties and where I came of age, in a sense-grew old enough, that is, to recognize that heavy metal was, essentially, tribal in nature and that it had everything to do with rhythm and aggression...
14 tags
Some Questions Concerning Art and Suffering
Shapiro explores the relationship between art and suffering. He says that the difference between what one’s suffer in the daily lives and the suffering enacted in a Greek tragedy has to do with how that suffering is shaped and ordered. He concludes by saying that he wants the kind of art that admits it is giving a song and dance when it transforms suffering into pleasure, pain into...
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Reading, Writing, Social Climbing: Fifteen Years...
by Monique P. Yazigi
(2170 words) Copyright New York Times Company Oct 3, 1999
EDES GILBERT saw it all. For 15 years as the headmistress of the Spence School, she saw the parents who lobbied for their 7-year-olds to be assigned to classes with children who weren’t their friends but whose parents were rich and prominent — in the hopes that the students would become friends and so...
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Vegas Landscapers Betting on Palm Trees; Desert:...
Vegas Landscapers Betting on Palm Trees; Desert: Casinos want the tropical icons to set the mood. Scouts patrol Southern California, looking for homeowners willing to sell their specimens for up to $1,000
by Angie Bluethman
Tom Chacon considers himself a recycler. He sends his “spotters” out across the West, counting on them to buy and uproot prized palm trees from...
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Skip Hollandsworth Does It Again: A 2002 Texas...
Full Text
(6102 words)
(Copyright Texas Monthly. 2002) “OH, YOU MUST COME. You simply must come,” Becca Cason Thrash exclaimed. I had called her to see if I could get myself invited to the party she was throwing in April to benefit Houston’s Stages Repertory Theatre. “We’re calling the night ‘A Celebration of American Fashion,’” she said,...
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Singing in Dark Times: A beautiful piece by Erica...
by Erica Funkhouser (Copyright Harvard Review 2005)
In the dark times, will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing
About the dark times.
-Bertolt Brecht, “Motto”
Early in 2003, poet and editor Sam Hamill was famously uninvited to the White House. Laura Bush had originally invited Hamill to join her at a February symposium to celebrate “Poetry and the...
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Poet Sam Hamill on meeting Kenneth Rexroth as a...
by Sam Hamill, originally published in the Chicago Review, Autumn 2006
I write for one and only one purpose, to overcome the invincible ignorance of the traduced heart. […]! wish to speak to and for those who have had enough of the Social lie, the Economics of Mass Murder, the Sexual Hoax, and the Domestication of Conspicuous Consumption.
-Kenneth Rexroth
In 1959, I was hip. On...
5 tags
Steve Job's once-estranged daughter on Mona...
Driving Jane by Lisa Brennan-Jobs
Published in The Harvard Advocate, Spring 1999
We drove. I sat on my mother’s lap in the driver’s seat and steered while she did the pedals, keeping us at 15 mph. She held her hands an inch away from the steering wheel, hovering, in case I overestimated one of the turns on our twisted road in Los Trencos, California. It was just the two of us, my mom and...
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Waterloo
by Lisa Brennan-Jobs, originally published in the Massachusetts Review Spring 2006
As Brennan-Jobs shares, when she met Emily, she and her friend Cole, recognized each other at once, but both of them seemed startled. At one of their conversations, Emily told her that she had met Cole at a party in one of Harvard’s final clubs in which she had a few drinks there, but didn’t...
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Tuscan Holiday: Steve Jobs' once-estranged...
by Lisa Brennan-Jobs, initially appeared in Vogue, February of 2008
COPYRIGHT (c)2008 THE CONDE NAST PUBLICATIONS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
At 24, Lisa Brennan-Jobs fell hard for a handsome Italian and his aristocratic world—until she realized what she would be giving up.
At 24, Lisa Brennan-Jobs fell hard for a handsome Italian and his aristocratic world—until she realized what...
A Secret Life of Madness: A Beautifully Written...
In her gravelly voice, Saks detailed for the psychologists how she became convinced that her former psychotherapist was a monster, how she needed to protect herself. Before one therapy session, Saks went to a hardware store to look at axes.
Still, she feared the therapist would abandon her, Saks told the audience, revealing her thoughts that back then raced toward a plot: I will kidnap her and...
October 2011
3 posts
Over the Edge with Pete Doherty - Copyright Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. Apr 6, 2006 [Headnote] CRACK,… http://t.co/dwk9yA45
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Over the Edge with Pete Doherty
By Mark Binelli (Rolling Stone, 2006)
Copyright Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. Apr 6, 2006
[Headnote]
CRACK, HEROIN, JAIL TIME AND SEX WITH A SUPERMODEL-ALL IN A DAY’S WORK FOR ROCK’S MOST SCREWED-UP GENIUS
WITH A PURPOSEFUL STRIDE, JOHNNY HEADLOCK APPROACHES THE BLACK metal security gate and quickly pulls himself up and over, dropping into the parking lot of a shabby-looking...
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What's More Fun Than A Good Old Fashioned Tonya...
The Tonya Harding fall
Sullivan, Randall. Rolling Stone. New York:Jul 14, 1994. Iss. 686-687, p. 80
.
Full Text (12537 words)
Copyright Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. Jul 14, 1994
It was newspaper stories of Tonya Harding’s chronic asthma and homemade costumes that moved Elaine Stamm. In February 1993, Stamm, a willowy former charm-school operator, wrote a letter to the...
September 2011
10 posts
“All the time I pray to Buddha I keep on killing mosquitoes.” - Kobayashi Issa, translated by Robert Hass… http://t.co/NC8scUYb
“What shall we dream of when everything becomes visible? We’ll dream of being blind.” - Paul Virilio (via… http://t.co/Bbr39kd5
1 tag
“What shall we dream of when everything becomes visible? We’ll dream of being...”
– Paul Virilio (via mythologyofblue)
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Did you say l’amour? I heard la mort!
-Jean Genet
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“All the time I pray to Buddha
I keep on
killing mosquitoes.”
– Kobayashi Issa, translated by Robert Hass (via proustitute)
The 32-Year-Old Mystery of Weldon Kees’ “Suicide: Or, On Maybe Meeting the Long-Missing Poet in a bar in… http://t.co/NtFq0Rq8
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The 32-Year-Old Mystery of Weldon Kees' "Suicide:...
Full Text (2182 words)
Copyright World Poetry, Incorporated Jul/Aug 2010
ONE EVENING IN THE SPRING OF 1957, I got into a long drunken discussion with another American in a cantina in Mexico City. I was 21 that year, trying to be a painter on the GI Bill, and I was full of passionate certainties.
The American was about 40, his bony frame made bulkier by a thick wool Oaxaca sweater, his face...
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My LAPD, Again: Joseph Wambaugh on Ellroy,...
By Joseph Wambaugh
(Copyright (c) 2006 Los Angeles Times)
A YEAR AGO, I had concluded that there were no more novels left in me and that my next book, if there was one, would be nonfiction. And then along came the wild one, author James Ellroy, back from his exile in various states and a brief sojourn in lovely Carmel. He was back in L.A., where he started, and he has been quoted as saying,...
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THE MIRROR OF YOUR SOUL: Identical Twins and...
From the Economist, Jan. 1998
BARBARA HERBERT, a former council worker living in southern England, discovered after the death of the woman she had thought was her mother that in fact she had been adopted. Among her assumed mother’s papers, she found a name and address in Finland. When that produced no answer, she contacted the local newspaper in Finland. A reporter dug up the story. Her...
May 2011
1 post
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Profound and poetic, Meredith Hall's essay, "The...
The Simplest Questions
by Meredith Hall
Copyright Kenyon College Summer 2008 (6723 words)
“Meredith,” Aliana says, “you talk about your sons all the time. I think you must be a wonderful mother. I think you should let me come live with you.”
Aliana knows that she has just a few short weeks left at the girls’ emergency shelter before the state has to move...
April 2011
3 posts
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The Great Pretender: Greil Marcus on "Mad Men" and...
Copyright Artforum Inc. Nov 2008
DON DRAPER SAT in his third-floor walk-up in the rue du Temple in the Marais. It was the winter of 1971. He had been there four years. After Maud, the Columbia English professor, his third black lover and the last woman to refuse to go to Paris with him, he went himself. To write, of course. His first book, a novel called Solitudes, about a boyhood on a ...
7 tags
REQUIEM FOR A DREAMLAND: Kevin Baker on Coney...
by Kevin Baker The Village Voice
They’re getting very near the end now at Coney Island. They’ve been tearing pieces off the place for years, and soon the bulldozers will be back again, pushing over the last, weathered links to the past on Surf Avenue.
Next to go this spring will be the old Bank of Coney Island, and the Shore Hotel, and the Grashorn Building, which goes all...
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TAVI SAYS: Lizzie Widdicombe profiles 14-year-old...
In Paris in January, after the Chanel couture show, Karl Lagerfeld greeted well-wishers on the runway at the Pavillon Cambon. The theme of the show had been silver, and Lagerfeld was wearing a variation on his usual black uniform—thin silver tie, slim gray jacket, gray motorcycle gloves, white hair in a tight ponytail. He was surrounded by handlers, photographers, and other people...
March 2011
1 post
Watchunholyrhythms:
I am proud to debut this video from the wonderfully enchanting Tashaki Miyaki. Created by TM’s friend, this video is for a track entitled “Nothing Can Change This Love”, which was originally done by Sam Cooke. It is a fantastically nostalgic, hypnotically heartfelt, spellbindingly sorrowful cover with just the right amount of yearning. Oh so good!
The track will be featured on a...
February 2011
6 posts
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Has Madalyn Murray O'Hair met her maker? (Texas...
Famed atheist activist Madalyn Murray O’Hair is officially missing, but many people believe she is dead. O’Hair’s life and work and the investigation into her disappearance and possible murder are discussed.
THE ONLY THING SHE LOVED more than a good fight was a grand spectacle-with herself at the center. And this was, as she might have put it, pretty gawddamn grand: an...
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Smoking: A Love Story (Esquire, '98)
IT’S BEEN MY HABIT,
MY HOBBY
MY LOVE.
MY CONSTANT COMPANION FROM BIRTH.
HOW CAN I LIVE WITHOUT IT?
Okay, okay, okay.
All right already.
I admit: I have a cough.
by Mike Sager (Copyright Hearst Magazines Feb 1998)
It’s a tiny little cough, neither acute nor chronic. Recurring would probably describe it best, be most accurate. In the morning it is dry. During the day it goes...
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FOOTPATHS BENEATH LA ECHO HISTORY: The...
Beneath the busy streets of the City of the Angels is a complex network of pedestrian tunnels that stretch several blocks from Spring and Temple streets to 1st Street and Grand Avenue. While Los Angeles mobster Mickey Cohen was on trial for tax evasion in 1951, he was hustled from the cells in the Hall of Justice through a tunnel under Spring Street to the federal courthouse.
by...
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ALTERNATIVE LA: Intrepid Pioneers Are...
by Kevin Roderick Los Angeles Times 9.30.01 You can live in Los Angeles for a long time without encountering the downtown of legend, a fashionable district that was the center of city life for half of the last century. Plush flagship department stores and glamorous movie palaces filled South Broadway with activity day and night. Ornate bank buildings and office blocks formed a beaux-arts ...
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JUMPERS: LETTER FROM CALIFORNIA
Every two weeks, on average, someone jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge, as it is the world’s leading suicide location. Suicide survivors often regret their decision in midair, if not before.
By Tad Friend Shortly after ten-thirty in the morning on Wednesday, March 19th, a real-estate agent named Paul Alarab began hiking across the Golden Gate Bridge. Midway along the walkway, which...
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An American family: Daniel Voll profiles Patty...
by Daniel Voll
IN THE HOLDING PEN at the Milwaukee County Jail, Patty and Allen Muth are waiting for the deputy sheriff to turn his back. They are both handcuffed and wearing prison-issue jumpsuits with white socks and flip-flops. She has hazel eyes and dark-blond hair and weighs ninety-five pounds. He is taller by a foot, a lanky redhead. The deputy is distracted by another inmate. Patty...
December 2010
11 posts
The rest will be tomorrow.
So leap with joy, be blithe and gay,
Or weep my friends with sorrow.
What California is today,
The rest will be tomorrow.
—the late poet Richard Armour.
MIRRORINGS: The late great Lucy Grealy on her...
There was a long period of time, almost a year, during which I never looked in a mirror. It wasn’t easy, for I’d never suspected just how omnipresent are our own images. I began by merely avoiding mirrors, but by the end of the year I found myself with an acute knowledge of the reflected image, its numerous tricks and wiles, how it can spring up at any moment: a glass tabletop, a...
You can take Hollywood for granted like I did, or...
“You can take Hollywood for granted like I did, or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve for what we don’t understand. It can be understood too, but only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.”
—Cecelia Brady in The Last Tycoon
"In a way I moved here for the isolation."
“You can live more privately here than anywhere else and yet still be in a city,” David Hockney said of L.A. “In a way I moved here for the isolation.”
THE PRICE OF PARADISE; ANNALS OF VACATIONS
At the Grand Wailea resort hotel on Maui, children and parents exist in a kind of ageless Neverland, in which grownups spend hours happily splashing in kiddie pools and children climb into booster seats at a restaurant where adult entrees cost forty or fifty dollars. Caitlin Flanagan describes her stay there with her husband and two sons. Even though they never made it to the beach, they had a...
WHAT TEACHERS WANT: Caitlin Flanagan examines the...
If you had a box filled with fourteen lime-green plastic shrimp forks and then you lost one, there are several things you could do. You could invite twelve people to dinner and serve shrimp. You could put the forks in a drawer and hope that the lost one eventually turned up. Or you could tape the box closed, wrap it in holiday paper, and give it to your child’s history teacher for...
Trying to Picture L.A. Clearly
by D.J. Waldie
Try picturing Los Angeles; it isn’t easy. The city in the background of so many car chases rarely comes into focus. In “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” Thom Andersen’s new documentary on the city’s appearance in the movies, Los Angeles oozes menace or withers like a corpse dumped in the desert. The city never looks like home.
Seeing how other...
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CRACK MURDER: A DETECTIVE STORY
by Ron Rosenbaum Copyright New York Times Company Feb 15, 1987
The events described in this article are true, the people are real. However, because the case has not yet gone to trial, the name of the deceased and the names of witnesses and suspects have been changed at the request of the New York City Police Department.
THE ANONYMOUS CALL came into the 71st Precinct shortly after 9 one...
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Los Angeles After the Rain
Los Angeles After the Rain
by Dana Gioia Back home again on one of those bright mornings when the city wakes to find itself reborn. The smog gone, the thundering storm blown out to sea, birds frantic in their joyous cacophony, and the mountains, so long invisible in haze, newly risen with the sun. It is morning snatched from Paradise, a vision of the desert brought to flower - of Eve...
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On Keeping a Notebook
On Keeping a Notebook by Joan Didion
That woman Estelle,’” the note reads, “‘is partly the reason why George Sharp and I are separated today.’ Dirty crepe-de-Chine wrapper, hotel bar, Wilmington RR, 9:45 a.m. August Monday morning.” Since the note is in my notebook, it presumably has some meaning to me. I study it for a long while. At first I have only...
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The Real O.J.
The Real O. J. by Bruce Jackson
From The Antioch Review, Vol. 62, No. 2, All Essay Issue: “The Real O. J. Story” (Spring, 2004), pp. 194-209
Family Feud A few evenings after 0. J. Simpson was arrested for the murders of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ron Goldman, a waiter at the Mezzaluna Restaurant in Westwood, California, my wife Diane and I had dinner with our...
November 2010
10 posts
Ca-li-for-ni-ay!
The climate is better
The ocean is wetter
The mountains are higher
The deserts are drier
The hills have more splendor
The girls have more gender
Ca-li-for-ni-ay!
…as sung by Deanna Durbin and Robert Paige in the 1945 movie “Can’t Help Singing.”
"It was the fate of Los Angeles—I almost said the...
The following is an edited excerpt of a talk by author D.J. Waldie (“Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles”) Dec. 7 at the Los Angeles Public Library, as part of the Zocalo Public Square lecture series (www.zocalo la.org).
Because we’ve seen “True Confessions” and “L.A. Confidential,” “Lost Highway” and “Blade...