When I was much younger, a writer named Paul Slansky put out a book that had a huge effect on me. The Clothes Have No Emperor: A Chronicle of the Reagan ’80s was formulated by its author as a defense mechanism, what we’d call today a means of self-care — …
With some things, you have to learn by either seeing it or participating in it. And you know yourselves that there are people walking around your community today that have all types of degrees that should be at this meeting, but are not here. Right? Because you can have as …
I don’t really care for outdoor music festivals. For one thing, I am a hundred and seventeen years old, and it is something that young people do, like smart drugs, the Banana Sprite Challenge, and being a well-dressed neo-Nazi. It also robs being outdoors of its major appeal (peace and tranquility), …
The Coachella Music Festival has been in the news lately, partly because it’s just that time of year and there’s never enough content to go around so somehow an overpriced outdoor concert is transformed into ‘news’, but mostly because of allegations that Philip Anschutz (the owner of AEG, the entertainment …
Recently, a meme was going around that your real age is 100 minus the number of bands playing at the Coachella music festival that you’ve actually heard of before. In my case, this turned out to be 63 — a good number, placing me (as in real life) right at …
Nina Simone was such a singular and remarkable talent that the story of her success seemed almost inevitable. The scientist Stephen Jay Gould once remarked that there was less to interest him in the folds of Einstein’s brain than there was in the near certainty that people just as brilliant …
This will be my last entry of 2016. Next year will begin, barring some unexpected act of fate, with the ascension to the presidency of Donald Trump, as dim-witted, incurious, crass, and crooked human being that has ever held public office in America. Trump has spent the hours since the …
Joe Sacco’s Palestine was first published in 1993 as a series of single-issue comic books, based on the author’s trip to the occupied territories of the Gaza Strip towards the end of the First Intifada. It was collected by Fantagraphics into a single edition in 1996, at a time when there …
As I’ve discussed endlessly in this space, one of my favorite things about the right-wing persecution complex that’s been so carefully cultivated by conservative politicians over the last 50 years or so is hearing people complain about things that are not only not actually happening, but are the opposite of …
It’s inevitable, in the face of any great political defeat or party realignment, for loyalties to get a bit shaky. Confusion rules the day, and the ally of yesterday is the heretic of tomorrow. Only a few months ago, when it looked like the Republican Party was about to shake …
Tampopo was a first for me in a lot of ways: not only the first movie I’d seen by Juzo Itami, but the first Japanese comedy I’d ever seen, and one of the first Japanese films I’d seen at all outside of Akira Kurosawa and a few samurai period pieces. …
One of those odd little quirks of timing that happens in the world of cinema took place this year when not one, but two films based on the life of Christine Chubbuck were filmed and released at almost exactly the same time. The first was Christine, a more or less straightforward …
I don’t really listen to much new music anymore. Partly this is because no one pays me to do it anymore, and partly it’s because I have other things to do, but mostly it’s just because I’m old, and nobody needs another white guy in his mid-40s telling them what …
Donald Trump isn’t even president yet and the liberal establishment is already in a frenzy, convinced that the apocalypse has arrived and that if we don’t hang Mitch McConnell for treason right this second, it will mean the end of the American Dream. Some are even lapsing into an all-too-familiar …
Say, did you know that television has gotten really good now? You bet your ass you did, because you’re alive and reading the internet. You could no more be ignorant of the rise of Quality Television than you could of the existence of Pizza Rat, or of how Donald Trump is …
