Why Couldn’t Richard Aoki Have Been an Informant?
...considered a threat to national security and exploitable by axis powers, in particular Japan, who was promoting its own version of Black-Asian solidarity. As a Cold War strategy the White...
Hospitality and The Hairworm
...across a paper published by two scientists in Japan, who had been studying my favorite parasite, the Nematomorpha, or horsehair worm. Their research, published by the Ecological Society of America...
The Future, Probably
...Overdrive were being written, Japan, as Gibson explains here, was "the global imagination's default setting for the future" ("Modern Boys and Mobile Girls"). That possible future may not be a...
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....
Built to Last
...as unoccupied as they look. They were very, very empty. RB: How then do these stadiums figure into local culture? JMS: A couple of the big complexes are actually south...
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,...
"Never could I tell him it was him."
...uniform, and has written plenty of songs about men who love men. If he’d wanted to write about a man reflecting on a boyhood crush on a dude, he’d have...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Vol. 73 Editors’ Note: Lies
What will be the story of how we made another world?