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.”
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.
In the 2020s, Chimpanzee culture is alive and well. We’ve moved beyond the ape-ish shrieks of Trump into the deviant forms of House Freedom Caucus Lancelot Link aggression. But as Frans de Waal says, “Dominant males are always paranoid.” That paranoia was easy to spot back in the 1990s. That’s when I created my first political hit piece. It’s banner featured Orange County Congressman Bob Dornan’s head Photoshopped onto the…
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…
I am not myself today. It isn’t because I am awash in all variety of ruination — that my 17 year-old dog, Luna, died in my arms last Wednesday or that my 100 year-old senile grandmother — of whom I am the only grandchild — called me Herman (her long deceased brother’s name), and told me to milk the cows (I consented, hundreds of miles from the nearest bovine utter)….
