Film, Television, Sex, Music, Literature, Pop
In the era of blogs and podcasts and independent, streaming news, I’ve been hesitant to agree when people blame “the media” for our problems. Personally, I can’t imagine taking CNN or MSNBC’s word for anything. I certainly don’t agree with everything I hear on Fox and I can’t imagine slogging through a daily diet of..
Review Sometimes a really awful movie franchise comes along and you are almost lucky enough to miss it completely, but a local theater crime last week, described as an unprovoked double homicide, can’t help but pose the question: does Critical Race Theory, popularized in C movies, lead dumb people to do evil things? Time, and..
A Dream: The rooftop patio of a red brick restaurant. Bougainvillea, Spanish iron hinges everywhere, flamboyant Toucans, a great concourse of friends and family — and Joe Biden, who is my responsibility for some reason. He’s standing in one of those shower stalls you see on the beach, except that it’s up on the top..
I woke up this morning with a kind of agitated melancholy, trying to summon up the plot of a dream that involved the landscapes of the San Gabriel Valley in my youth. It was some sort of Alta Dena/Sierra Madre back street, hilly, lined with tire shops and liquor stores. A guy in a jean..
Marc Tessier-Lavigne, president of Stanford University, reminds the alumni, on the anniversary of George Floyd’s death, that awful things have happened in this country, that these awful things are being studied, that new “clusters” of race-specialist faculty are being hired to combat the awful things, that they have a flashy new acronym (“IDEAL” — Inclusion,..
Seen yesterday: at least a dozen spry old guys in their late 70s, at various points on the beach, trotting along in wet suits, with long boards under their arms, flirting with bikini-clad women five decades their junior. Silver-chested endless summer. Jimmy Buffett lives. Surf culture, which was once young, cheap and rebel-spirited is now..
Is it just me or is it even more crazy than usual? Most of us sense the big streak of pure crazy at the heart of the world’s order — that vast pool of “plain wrong” billowing up like dangerous waters below us. Christianity makes it no less than a central dictate: “Do not love..
Donald Trump and the Pharisees Four Years Later I think the Good Lord gave me some small ability to heap insult and ridicule on dumb people and evil ideas, but I haven’t used my gift as well as I should. It’s been bothering me, because I truly believe God allowed Donald Trump to teach me..
You probably are one. No, I don’t mean the sort you might find renting a trailer on Uncle Dawson’s pea farm, after finishing a 10 year stretch at the Tucker, Arkansas Maximum Security Unit, or the sort you might find in a Hollywood “look how far we’ve come” flick. We all know those guys are..
What sounds more like Jim Crow than Jim Crow? Imagine the perils, for example, of a police force unable — completely — to restrain a black assailant merely because he’s black? Where does that leave the rest of us in a street mugging or a bank robbery?
