The incorruptible cadaver of Saint Bernadette. Swiss Guards in Renaissance finery; solemn monks holding candles; a male choir chanting in the occult tongue of Latin; the anguished faithful, wracked with grief, clasping their hands in prayer or seeming to clutch at the passing bier; and, at the center of this deeply pagan drama, the flesh […]
Cleveland billboard, “liberated” by unindicted co-conspirators inspired by POPaganda: The Art & Crimes of Ron English. A documentary about billboard bandit and agit-pop artist Ron English by filmmaker and media activist Pedro Carvajal, POPaganda played to a sold-out house at The Cleveland International Film Festival. (Image courtesy Pedro Carvajal.) By my lights, Ron English’s work […]
Last night, a funny thing happened on the way to a Seinfeld re-run: I grazed past the PBS Newshour and got sucked into a report on the god-botherers’ latest incursion into America’s classrooms. Usually, watching the Newshour‘s fair and balanced roundtables of pale, male thinktank flacks, national security hawks, and below-the-beltway practitioners of Kissingerian realpolitik […]
Reading is FUN-damental! Everybody’s talking about the Ann Coulter Great Books Program©, “Reading for Right-Wingers,” a tastes-great, less-filling curriculum hand-picked by our favorite intellectual ectomorph.
Having just returned from the grand tour of the Grand Canyon, I can say with authority that Edmund Burke didn’t know the half of it. Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818). Burke never visited the vertiginous abyss that, more than any other natural wonder, embodies his belief that terror is the […]
Now that Fleet Street’s carrion-feeders have fled, The Department of Hitler Studies (chairman emeritus: Jack Gladney) wonders about the deeper meanings of this whole foofaraw. To begin, who hacked the hakenkreuz on Harry’s armband? Did the costume manufacturer attempt to inoculate the wearer against public outrage by defanging the infamous icon—shortening the bent part of the cross?s arms? (Hitler?s eye for graphic design insisted on longer, more symmetrical arms.)
Und so weiter…
Today is “Not One More Damn Dime Day,” when conscientious objectors to four more years of our fratboy-in-chief’s Excellent Adventure are supposed to rage, rage against the machine by participating in “a 24-hour national boycott of all forms of consumer spending.” (As opposed to, like, non-consumer spending. You know, consuming without spending, like those supermarket […]
My essay, “Dead Seas: The Psychogeography of Southern California,” appears in the new Cabinet. This is the latest in a series of essays I’ve been writing about growing up in the San Diegan suburb of Chula Vista, in the late ’60s and ’70s.
Recently, while submitting to the fond attentions of a dental surgeon, I found myself musing idly, in an opiated haze, about the symbolic weight of teeth—musings disturbed only by the surgeon’s resolute yanking on the offending tooth, a yanking that came to me only distantly, as a not entirely unpleasant tugging, punctuated by the occasional squeak, reminiscent of the sound of a nail being pried out of a floorboard. Maybe it was the Novocain, but I found myself wondering if the widespread fear of dentists is at least in part a subconscious, perhaps even archetypal, fear of teeth, or if that’s just the perspective of someone whose dental history is written in anxiety and agony (and all the requisite drama-queen hysterics that go with them).