A work of art by any standards ...
...Illustration from China and Japan: Being a Narrative of the Cruise of the U.S. Steam-Frigate Powhatan, in the Years 1857, '58, '59, and '60 (1861) "Not a single...
Party Time
...Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas. Antiques meant nothing — or trouble. The fervent modernist destruction of the past foreshadowed (and inspired) our postmodern passion for preserving it....
Un(der)known Writers: Nicola Chiaromonte
...Photo: Hiroshima, Japan (1945) “The individual who has lived through a great historical upheaval has not only been dispossessed of his beliefs. He has found himself face to...
Justice in One Country
...for example) and also “detached from his own marginality.” But in a world where, as André 3000 puts it, “across cultures, darker people suffer most,” detaching is easier for some...
Sunday Reading
...bombing of Japan" "State officials ordered the photos removed from a website operated by the University of Texas at Austin." "three ambulances failed to find the Olympic velodrome because their...
Little Orphan Nellie
...turn up somewhere ripped and stoned and undercover and immerse yourself in a culture or practice, then write viscerally, from the brain and the gut. In fact, women were doing...
Africa : Queer : Anthropology
...more concerned in the anthropology of the changingAfrican, and in the anthropology of the contact of white and coloured, of European culture and primitive tribal life. A mentor told me...
The Hinterland: A Travelogue, Part 4
...pinning it under me beside the car. It writhed and dripped and started singing broken snippets of my favorite songs, messing up the same words that I did each time,...
St. Paul (A Screenplay)
...companions flee, in the midst of the chaos of the alley, among the little bars of the seaside city, with the lights on in the middle of the night, songs,...
My David Bowie
...I can't imagine I would have asked for it. Still, I was deeply disappointed by it at the time. The spoken-word section in Japanese that opens the album put me...
Morpheus Descending
...father's approach to insomnia was likely the exception rather than the rule; most people at the time looked to less complicated remedies. Said Iago to Othello: “Not poppy nor mandragora,...
Ramadan Diaries: Where's the Information?
...re-reading John Berryman's The Dream Songs, which I do or think about doing every day, I'm also reading Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche's The Tibetan Yogas of Dream & Sleep: Practices for...
Not NATO
...Chicago, to cover the #noNato protests. Laurie sent me snaps and stories of her busmates: kids who were singing Disney songs as they prepared to be beaten and arrested. So...
Run, Boy, Run
...about a hypocritical religious figure, could just as easily be read as a feminist or reparations revenge anthem. Typically, revenge anthems—like love songs—are too limited. Why punish one cheating bastard...
Thoughts on a Word: Fine
...songs about fine women is initially perplexing. Bruce Springsteen, Jimi Hendrix, Clarence Garlow, The Easybeats, Flash Cadillac, Big Boy Myles, Roscoe Dash—all of these artists have recorded a song entitled...
A Contribution to the Critique of John Mayer
...and quelling, that series of cuts between which slosh their echoes, their marrow, our froth or songs. With him still out there somewhere, it's almost like what we see when...