The grave’s a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace. –Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress” Advance into the territory of pubic hair only increased Playboy’s circulation. Hefner by the mid-1970s, well into his role as iconic hero living the Playboy life, nevertheless […]
If Coke Is a mystery Michael Jackson History If beauty is truth And surgery the fountain of youth What am I to do Have I got the gifts to get me through The gates of that mansion –U2, “The Playboy Mansion” Hefner landed consistently great quarterly earnings reports, and though his empire faltered and […]
It would not be better if man could get what he wants. –Heraclitus I’m fascinated by Hugh Hefner’s one in a billion karma. Not only did he rise quickly out of the middle class into a life awash in millions of dollars, he transgressed […]
Two divas who reign currently over the global pop world—Taylor Swift and Beyoncé—released major records this year. Both rocketed into music as teen phenoms; both eventually wrested complete managerial, fiduciary, and aesthetic control into their own hands, and they’ve both flourished. No one tells them what to do. They choose the other artists they want […]
There’s much to appreciate in Kerouac’s haiku descriptions of human emotions and humanity: Her yellow dolls bowing on the shelf— My dead step grandmother The artifacts of the person now dead stand in that person’s place, and continue to articulate who she was. Are they bowing to her? I rather think they’re […]
Allen Ginsberg liked to say, “Notice what you notice,” by way of meditative writing advice. We notice things, but then we’re in a hurry and already on to the next one. Or we self-edit, and tell ourselves what we saw has no importance or meaning, and paper it over with something else. But things do […]
Recently I attended Tom Peters’ long-running poetry reading series (35 years of consecutive Monday nights!) here in Boulder. Tom runs the Beat Book Shop on the Pearl Street Mall, and every year gives time for people to take the stage and read from Jack Kerouac’s work. This year we commemorated a hundred years since Kerouac’s […]
I’ve been posting political screeds for the last month, as the prospects for the collapse of American democracy came into view, but somehow it continues to breathe and remains above ground. If you attended to those discussions, I focused them on how language gets employed to re-create reality in the image power-mongers want you to […]
As the Democrats retain control of the Senate, and, likely with the Republicans achieving only a slim, fractious majority in the House, the Republicans get to now engage in blame and finger-pointing. The Republicans even blew the state level races in major electoral battlegrounds like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona, where they fervently hoped to control […]
