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…
There’s nothing more pathetic than a player born on third base who acts like he/she/they/it hit a triple. They’re either dense, delusional, or dead. If they’re charismatic, however. The equation shifts. The usually get others to cheer for their talent and ingenuity.
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.
Ronald Reagan, 33rd Governor of California, 40th president of the United States and one bad actor once said, “Politics is just like show business. You have a hell of an opening, coast for a while, and then have a hell of a close.” Although I can’t say much for his arc, Reagan did give us a hell of a close. There were unrelenting TV specials, memorial books, magazines and DVDs;…
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…
