(June 1, 2023)
It's interesting how associative memory works. I can think of someone I know or have known, and that thought will pass through like a windy cloud, shapeless and fleeting. However,...
(May 25, 2023)
I've always found it kind of odd that we call it Memorial Day, since the American consciousness is generally incapable of attaching memory to reflection in a way that serves...
(May 18, 2023)
Last weekend, I decided to do something I occasionally find myself driven to with the same blind intensity of purpose that steers a spawning salmonid: I rewatched a favorite movie....
(May 11, 2023)
Living year-round in a college town is weird and it seems living in a Cal Poly town is only going to be weirder. Assuming I will ever be able to...
(May 4, 2023)
Last week we lost Harry Belafonte and early this week, Gordon Lightfoot saw his last sundown. In both cases, there is in my mind a tone of triumph rather than...
(April 27, 2023)
"Every love story is a ghost story" was a favorite quote of the late author David Foster Wallace, which he attributed to the later author Virginia Woolf. This wasn't the...
(April 20, 2023)
Well friends, it's the beginning of flower season again and I could not be more pleased. I'm talking calendulas, daffodils, trilliums, California poppies (not the band, but they are fine,...
(April 13, 2023)
Very few people are immune to the temptations of self-mythologization. This makes sense in America, where we are raised from birth by the flashing dream machines provided by...
(April 6, 2023)
A lot of important figures in the music world have passed away recently, three that I consider quite notable are saxophone god Wayne Shorter, multi-instrumentalist and hired gun David Lindley,...
(March 30, 2023)
The birth of the modern world, the fresh and terrible 20th century, is a tough date to pin down, but an argument can be made, culturally at least, that the...
(March 23, 2023)
At the end of the preface to Hegel's difficult but rewarding work Elements of the Philosophy of Right, the philosopher evokes the image of Minerva (in Greece, Athena) the goddess...
(March 16, 2023)
I remember describing irony in a high school English class as something that fundamentally deals with opposites. I was looking down when I said it, having at the time not...
(March 9, 2023)
I have probably mentioned here before that I like going for walks, often at odd hours to avoid other people. This isn't out of any misanthropic impulse, but to stay...
(March 2, 2023)
In the first act of Shakespeare's The Tempest, when a violent storm is destroying a ship before leaving its occupants stranded on Prospero's island, the lowly Boatswain marvels at the...
(February 23, 2023)
Because I make it a point to listen at home to the music of as many of the artists that I cover here, the algorithms on all the sources and...
(February 16, 2023)
I'm pretty horrified at the lack of comprehensive coverage of the ongoing vinyl chloride train derailment catastrophe. If you don't like my bummer intros, skip ahead to a rather dynamic...
