Bob Ross, perhaps the most important mainstream American artist of the 1980s, is undergoing a resurgence of late.

It’s mid-September, and your room is set up at last. Your chair is here, your toes are toasty in the A.M. thanks to a whimsically shagged carpet you bought at Wal-Mart, your creamy walls glow with the efflorescence of a thousand late nineteenth-century French advertisements purchased from the student poster agency.

“Junior can’t learn to read if he’s high on crack!”
This most delightful of exclamations comes perhaps halfway through Silver City, indie director John Sayles’s uneven attempt at political satire.

On November 26th, 2003, rapper Soulja Slim was gunned down outside of the duplex he had bought for his mother in the Chantilly neighborhood of New Orleans.

JG:  What does it mean to be Dean of the College?
DM:  Dean of the College means that I’m responsible for undergraduate education, curriculum, academic advising, academic regulations, the academic standing of the students...

Outside #01-239, the post office in Lucky Plaza, they leer at her, and she wonders what the three of them are doing there. Don’t Bangladeshi workers belong in Little India?

from far away the scent of amber-greased bodies
under the gray electric blue lights

I like you best when your lines are blurry,
and your words melt from mouth to air

Poem on creation and destruction of fiction and reality.