I went to school with snarky stoners and rich Foreign students (mostly Iranians) and lots of entitled shits. I always thought of the entitled shits as 99ers, based on my estimate of their average IQ, but I’m sure quite a few of those IQs were closer to 90. They were reliably hilarious, the 99ers, often fun to have around, with something of the simian (as in “W” Bush, I realize, in retrospect) about their faces… those tiny, close-set eyes and taut parenthetical lips…  and a social carelessness that the other kids, the kids from genuinely good homes, who’d been raised … Continue reading SARAH and the BODHISATTVAS

Long walk in the bitter cold the other day with longtime acquaintance René, who is roughly my age (younger by two or three years) and grappling with Existential matters he has successfully held at arm’s length for a couple of decades. René was preoccupied with doing his best to “sell out” (his own words) since a year or two before the turn of the century, when he turned 39. I met René in 2001, a few weeks after I’d returned to Berlin to settle permanently; we met on the premises of a so-called filmmaking academy that was actually a front … Continue reading PROFILES IN SHEER NERVE: A Heavily-Bowdlerized Journal Entry regarding the Summer of 2001 and Beyond

Without Life’s bizarre and often ironic twists and turns and dips and loops, it wouldn’t be Life… it would be a plain old anecdote, about which we can confidently declare that it (an anecdote) is supposed to have a point, an attribute so patently unlike Life. The New Age metaphysicians  who assert that Life’s point is to teach us (to live) are indulging in the kind of tautology that made me question the “wisdom” of almost everything I read (that wasn’t sci fi) in the 1970s. I once saw a friend, whom I had always considered a level-headed cynic, declare … Continue reading FATHERSTORY: THE INVERSIONS

I came late to Sex or it came late to me. In 1968 I had already been a Beatles fan for nearly half my life and The Beatles I knew were not about Sex unless one already knew enough about Sex to look for clues in the lyrics. I listened obsessively to The Beatles on a portable Philips record player. In ’68 this little briefcase-sized box was a marvel, powered by six “D” batteries, its heavy speaker built into the lid. I remember listening to “Being for the Benefit of Mister Kite” on this Philips portable while my mother listened … Continue reading SURREALISM and its UNWITTING MISSIONARIES

  Unlike many reading this, I was raised in an actual Revolutionary Movement. My father and his comrades were Black Diasporist Radicals of the ’60/ ’70s who genuinely believed that an armed overthrow of the US government was feasible and inevitable. I attended various Revolutionary Meetings (as a bored observer) as a schoolboy; I attended Revolutionary Street Theater events and spent time, with my father, at the community Arts collective that was one of the hubs of Revolutionary Activity in the city. I met three famous activists in my father’s presence (including Muhammad Ali, whose hand I deigned to shake). … Continue reading RAISED in a REVOLUTION

  One person… or a thousand people… or a hundred thousand people… won’t stop Predatory Banking, or Corporate Environmental Degradation, or War, et al. Marching, signing petitions, watching “edgy” satirical political comedy, paypal-ing Leakers, even throwing Molotov cocktails: the system is designed not only to absorb or shrug off such things but, worse, such things help to stabilize the system. Such things are (romantic) cathartic gestures that blow off steam and provide the illusion that things are changing and that opposition lives and All is Not Lost. Keeps the lid from blowing. There are lucky apparent exceptions scattered around the … Continue reading PHILOSOPHICAL LESSONS FROM MY FATHER’S MOST DEDICATED FAILURES