They change the sky, not their soul, who run across the sea,” said Horace, the Roman lyric poet. “Think about where you are right now,” he might have added. “Do you want to leave? Do you want to see more of that world, and less this one? The one that is home? Do you think that travel broadens your perspective? Don’t. Travel narrows the mind.”
During a game of chess near the end of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Miranda, the fourteen-year-old daughter of Prospero, envisions drunken sailors staggering off the wreckage of a ship. Miranda — a cultural critic with an Orwellian bent, comments, “O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world! That has such people in’t!”
Have you read the horrifying literature on beef? Are you haunted by zombie chickens crippled by their weight, oceans with so much lead and plastic that fish are chemically enhanced, pesticides and hormones in your every meal, or rainforests replaced by cattle feed crop fields?
In Buena Park on May 19, 1951, the parents of 10-year-old Patty Jean Hull told police their daughter was missing. Four days later, television cameras zoomed in on Hull’s uncoiling story. As real-time TV signals from Santa Ana’s jail radiated throughout Southern California, we entered the age of broadcast voyeurism.
At a press conference in Hamburg, Germany on September 16, 2001, my favorite German avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was asked whether the characters Michael and Lucifer from a cycle of operas he wrote were for him “merely some figures out of a common cultural history” or instead “material appearances.” In other words, were they fake or were they real? The composer replied, “I pray daily to Michael, but not to…
The nameless is the beginning of art and baseball. While the named is the mother of statistics, the nameless is the gateway to the mystery of everlasting hardball truth.
The first time I saw the Carl Diedrich Memorial Van was in 1978. It was parked outside Diedrich’s 10-foot-by-25-foot coffee import shop at the back end of a strip mall near the corner of Irvine Boulevard and 17th Street in Costa Mesa, California. In fact, the VW van is how I found Diedrich’s. It was a landmark. If you spotted it, you had found the best coffee beans in the…
Hell is hot for many reasons. Punishment, by itself, is not the only consideration. Dante’s thermostat may be in the red for inspiration…or as a forewarning…or as a symbol of passion to motivate us up here on the upper crust of planet earth. But sitting in the summer heat of an un-airconditioned doctor’s office yesterday, I was convinced that, at the very least, hell is real. My visit to Dr….
Every year, my personal physician wants to drain blood out of me for testing. I oblige and the results, so far, have been excellent. On the other hand, my visit to the phlebotomist — the one who draws my blood — makes me ill at ease. Since I’ve never been a diabetic or a junkie, jelly popping needles into my blood vessels isn’t something I’m comfortable with. It’s not that…
The other day, my cousin Wayne — who, by his own admission, is a very religious man — told me I’d go to hell because of the language I use. He was half serious and half right. I do use language that could get me in trouble. Let me explain. The podcast broadcast you’re listening to is designated as “explicit” on iTunes. One definition for the word “explicit” is “precisely…
