BOULDER, CO-

This year, being the proud Obamabot that I am, I eagerly followed the left wing conspiracy all the way to my garden. Never mind the fact that I live at 9000 ft in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and get exactly 11.3 weeks of contiguous summer. The White House grounds currently survive an inordinate measure of chill under the scrutiny of the GOP. If Michelle could do it, I reasoned, so could I.

(more…)

NEAR 91 DEGREES LONGITUDE-

I confronted eschatology too young. Although benign compared to some beliefs, my Catholic upbringing placed me at the sidelines of Armageddon—strange references to a kingdom come, the Second Coming, Judgment Day. I got queasy at the mention of the Book of Revelations. Sermons and syntactically-strained Bible readings led me to infer a tremendous destructive end to all life, human, animal, insect, plant. There were drawings in books, filled with fire, angels and demons, a sea of the damned. For a child, it’s impossible to reconcile a loving Father with one who will kill every one of his children with wanton violence. Children also don’t grasp metaphor.

(more…)

LOS ANGELES, CA-

There is no point to this. The point is that I’m getting sick. I just noticed it an hour ago. Suddenly I am blowing my nose. Out of nowhere. And now feeling a little wonky. So I took some vitamin C and ate about 14 pounds of sautéed spinach and now I am sitting here waiting to die. If the pig flu gets me tell them I was an okay guy. Kind of quiet and not very good at tennis, but basically decent.
(more…)

GULF BREEZE, FL -

A little homage to Paul Toth’s hilarious “Interview” series, which you can read here. (See 8 of the last 9 posts.)

George Clooney was at the coffee shop where I hang out. He stopped by my table after he got his latte.

“You and I are pretty much on the same team, you know,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

(more…)

COLDEN, NY -

Prologue: I’m getting worried about the Simon Smithson Effect (SSE). This afternoon I was fiddling with this piece, which is a companion to the earlier “I Don’t Brake for Mongoose,” both belonging to a larger work called “The Dump,” when in comes an email from the guy in Hilo who’s been using my trailer, telling me that this morning at sparrowfart, when he was least expecting it, he was stopped by a cop and told to register the trailer or face a $100 fine. SSE? WTF? LOL! Read on.
(more…)

LOS ANGELES, CA-

10. Inappropriate

Here’s the email I got from Genevre.

“Ok, I first thought you were creepy in the bar when you tried to kiss my neck and told me I smelled like blue toilet water. But now I get it that someone told you about my being attracted mainly to Jewish men. Facebooking me and asking if I’m a Hitler sympathizer confirms the creepy part I mentioned earlier. I understand your ploy. I do not find you attractive. In fact, your even writing me when you have a very lovely wife is wildly inappropriate. Please leave me alone?”

(more…)

LOS ANGELES—

After one of the first Die Princess Die shows I attended, Pete, the guitarist and co-frontman, asked what I thought. I allowed that the show was pretty good, except I wished the band would break more stuff.

He considered that a lame reaction—or “stupid” is the adjective I believe he used. I was surprised, since we’d initially bonded over our shared enthusiasm for …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, a band notorious at the time for breaking stuff.

Over the next couple of years, however, Die Princess Die evolved into perhaps the most destructive, if not out-and-out violent, band in Southern California. They scared people, and I think that partly accounts for the large following they deserved but never acquired, despite having not just one but two frontmen with movie-star looks.
(more…)

SOMEWHERE VERY HOT, USA-

Does anyone worry about the Seven Deadly Sins anymore?

I don’t mean the machinations of the lunatic featured in Se7en, starring Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman…

…or the Seven Deadly Sins computer game (Partial description from the Kongregate website: “Enter the quiet English town of Gorpsdale and use your skill, guile and ingenuity to find suitable ways of breaking each sin” — suitable?)…

…or the rock group Seven Deadly Sins…

…or songs of the same name by the Traveling Wilburys, Flogging Molly, Lotte Lenya or a dozen groups you never heard of.

No.  I don’t mean a trivial expression dripping with convenient irony — intended or otherwise.  The Seven Deadly sins — ha ha.  They’ll send you You Know Where — wink wink. (more…)

LONDON-

Within a day of arriving in London after eighteen months in the somnolent calm of Sardinia, I woke to the sound of police sirens, rotor blades from circling helicopters, the smell of fried rice from the Chinese restaurant below, the pitter-patter of cockroaches in the bathroom and breaking crockery downstairs as our Bangladeshi neighbour got on with the usual routine of beating up his wife. (more…)

SARASOTA, FL-

Since nearly every interview with Sean Penn immediately notes that he lights cigarettes with the regularity of old women on prune juice, Sean Penn lit his third cigarette before our interview had begun. He spent that time gazing at me as if I were some sort of fantastic form of quartz. He is, and will always be, one of Hollywood’s foremost geologists, digging up jewels of roles, which he then polishes like a rock tumbler. He lit a cigarette before finishing the other one and smoked the two simultaneously. Soon, he was smoking fifteen cigarettes at the same time. He put on his sunglasses, took them off, and put them on again. It’s a useless actor’s ploy, and he was being ironic, I’m sure of it. (more…)

SARASOTA, FL-

Now more than ever comes publishing industry’s chance to redeem itself. It might finally take chances again, though for me “again” means about the time when I was ten years old and watching Dick Cavett interviews with novelists I, even at that age, recognized as culturally dangerous. (more…)

LOS ANGELES, CA-

“The Maid of the Mist isn’t running,” a tourist with a British accent says, studying a map of Niagara Falls, New York. “Wasn’t there something called the Cave of the Winds?” His companion, a slim woman with red hair and freckles and dark-brown eyes, shrugs, crinkling her nose. The man continues, “I remember you wore raincoats, climbed a slippery wooden stairway and entered a cave behind the falls.” “Maybe,” the woman answers, but she seems cold in her black pea coat, seems to shrink from an overcast day and icy drizzle. She puts a small hand on the man’s arm and asks, “Would we want it to be open in November?”

The Cave of the Winds, once located behind the Bridal Veil Falls, was destroyed by a controlled dynamite blast in 1955. By then the once large cave – 130 feet high, 100 feet wide and 100 feet deep, had shrunk and been reduced to about a third its original size. Falling rocks had ‘shrunk’ the cave and hurt or endangered several visitors. (more…)

BAKERSFIELD, CA-

The glue was pink. Barrels of thick pink glue.

Pink liquid poured through tubes, was sucked into basins where rollers whipped through them, coating pads. The rollers spun like little worlds on their axis. The pads, if you used your imagination just right, were shaped like continents and dripped with pink goo.

As each piece of paperboard shot through the rollers, pads would leave their marks. (more…)

LOS ANGELES -

A number of fires are currently raging throughout the Los Angeles area:

There’s the Sylmar ‘Sayre’ Brush Fire.

The Corona, Yorba Linda ‘Freeway Complex’ Fire.

The Montecito ‘Tea’ Fire, and Triangle Complex Fire.

There seem to be more fires than there are Jacksons:

(more…)

SARASOTA, FL-

Call this Piss Americana.  Not only were we duped into believing a bank bailout was necessary, and not only must we pay the very institutions that caused this economic crisis (”Granny, can I call it a ‘depression’ now?”), but the banks have already unleashed plans to blatantly misuse the appropriated funds. I suggest we should have let them have their free market and take us all down with them, so that real change might occur…and you know what that will take: the burning, the looting, and the exposure of the police state ready to react (but perhaps not so ready as it thinks).  Yet beyond all of this, Bank of America, in particular, and major banks in general, continue engaging in an unconscionable tactic that generates billions of dollar in stolen profits every year: “Fees.” (more…)

SARASOTA. FL-

Page 1

The End

NASHVILLE, TN-

Okay, I’m obviously not the best one to cover the debate but (far as I know) I’m the only TNB’er in Tennessee.

I was raised in South Louisiana, kinfolk to corrupt politicians and good-hearted mob bosses, to believe that politics were basically a work, a necessary concoction to give the masses the illusion of control, that the powers that be ran the show and installed the puppets of their choice depending upon the social dynamics of the times, much like an actor is awarded a particular role.

It’s a warped view and probably best if you don’t see things my way.

But there’s a presidential debate right here in Music City—and I do like to people watch. So here I am, in downtown Nashville at Belmont College.

(more…)

SARASOTA, FL-

A planet in the microwave. A holocaust of animals. Plants have feelings, too. So many students and workers, so few jobs. Office ne’erdowells camaflauged by multiprocrastinating. In every case, the problem is clear. It’s people. And we should eat us.

I’m not suggesting cannabalism, per se. We should be processed, like meat, as humanely slaughtered as the average cow.

In any case, too many people exist, and the most productive, think-outside-the-box solution is to feed ourselves to ourselves. (more…)

LOS ANGELES-

Recently I had a chance to sit down with the actor Stuart Townsend. A native of Ireland, Townsend has appeared in a variety of films and television shows, and he has now taken on his most ambitious project to date: writing, directing, and producing Battle in Seattle, a movie centered on the WTO riots of 1999. Battle makes its debut in select theaters on September 19th. New York magazine has called it “a triumph,” and Jeffrey Lyons of NBC’s Reel Talk has hailed it as “a compelling and impassioned film with powerful performances.”

At the time of our meeting, Mr. Townsend was neck-deep in promotional work, hustling to get the word out about his film. He was sleep-deprived but cordial, passionate about his project and the issues at its core. We had a wide-ranging discussion about the movie and its origins.

(more…)

BURBANK,CA-

Picture this: Hungover semi-employed writer chain smoking on balcony in last night’s skimpy yet very comfortable and flattering outfit, unable to produce.

Yeah, that’s me. I haven’t mentioned the shoes I’m wearing, but trust me, they’re fabulous. I picked them up in Portland last week. Actually, I got two pairs, one in red and one in black. I’m wearing the black ones.

Still.

Which, in my bent mind, just proves me right about what good taste I have in shoes.

I love to be right.

(more…)