Just Cool Enough for School
Bicker is an important rite of passage for people with a creeping suspicion that they might be cool. Champagne bubbles and dreams of Ivy League grandeur saturate even the most level of heads. Some even go so far as to pop their collars. Remembering back to my sophomore days, I think I might have even […]
Conservative Canucks?
When Stephen Harper was elected the new Prime Minister of Canada, American liberals freaked out. I have one thing to say in response: chill out, seriously.
Rauschenberg’s “Combines”
When asked how he maintains his creative process, the artist Robert Rauschenberg, 81, says that he trusts in his materials without relying on the comfort of sureness and certainty. “Sometimes,” he continues, “Jack Daniels helps too.” It doesn’t come as a surprise that Robert Rauschenberg—Bob, as he calls himself—veered away from his original name, Milton. […]
It Happened in New York
“Slavery was not a side-show in American History. It was the main event.” So says James Oliver Horton, history professor at George Washington University.
Do Not Cross The Color Line
At the awkward gathering of New York area students who had been accepted to Princeton, the father of another black student approached me as I poured myself a glass of ginger ale. “You know, we have to stick together,” he declared, after introducing himself. I agreed with him then, and I still do now. It […]
Reminiscences of Tacky Rubbish
I drove by Red Robin the other day. It sits on the corner of La Cumbre Plaza. About everything else in the mall has changed in the ten years since I last set foot in Red Robin, filling up with shi-shi boutiques to cater to the Montecito crowd. Instead of a Mrs. Field’s cookies, an […]
Riding with the Boss
The thirtieth anniversary edition of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run came out a few months back. For better or worse, we have all chosen to spend four years in Springsteen country, and truth be told, he’s kind of hard to avoid
Two Poems
BOX You’d handed me the thing because I’d asked to read your letters, made in Romania— not that you’d been there yourself, but from an aunt, you spoke, half-crazy. And because it was a puzzle, you said: Open it. You spied my crooked digits— you, the gentler bastard —fumbling the sloped and starry curvature amalgam […]
Read Slowly and See
In 1968 John Sinclair of the band DC5 wrote that “rock and roll music is a weapon of cultural revolution.” But this overtly political attitude – emblematic of 1960’s music, or at least of the retelling of the story of sixties music – was becoming increasingly antithetical to a certain subset of the youth counterculture. […]