When the devil came to California he brought along a bevy of hip, bejingled Berkeley dancers… Read full post »

Breaking news: This American Life has retracted its Mike Daisey story because Mike Daisey admitted, in several instances, to fabricating details that were aired on the radio as a fact-checked, vetted non-fiction story.

The transcript of the retraction show is al… Read full post »

 shock jock blames his hatred of women on

 his hatred of hip hop……

 I’m a man who’s easily bored

an Archie Bunker type—

minus the irony—

I believe marriage to be a sacred vow before God

between a woman and a woman and a woman… Read full post »

road to Glen Aulin

God himself seems to be always doing his best here, working like a man in a glow of enthusiasm.
—John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra

July 28, 2011

 Last night we slept under the Sierra sky you once called a bell-flower, out… Read full post »

Faceless job, circling,

un-Enola Gay fliers,

If the square root of no new taxes

is divided by the budget of Planned Parenthood and NPR,

the integer greater than the top 400 wealthiest Americans’ tax breaks

will be divided by the sum of Wallstreet-predicted quarterly job growth

minus the total cost… Read full post »

“I have thought for a long time now that if, some day, the increasing efficiency for the technique of destruction finally causes our species to disappear from the earth, it will not be cruelty that will be responsible for our extinction and still less, of course, the… Read full post »

  _{(Photo from AP)}

Last night I dreamed I met Angelina Jolie. She was squatting on the ground with a group of people who lived in a small village. I came near and hunched down too and said, “thank-you for drawing attention to people suffering… Read full post »

Since this series, Toxic by Vice Magazine’s Thomas Morton, has made it all the way to CNN, and I can’t get the original embed to work here, I’ll post the CNN version with links to VBS.tv’s part two and three. Even though this was first published about a month ago,… Read full post »

 News sources are reporting

a verdict in the Mehserle trial has been reached

and will be announced at 4:00 pm today.

No changes or disruptions to BART and other forms of

public transportation

have been announced and it is not… Read full post »

you don’t want a friend

at your side at ball games

cheering for the losing team

        no matter who they are.

you want someone to wear

your jersey, sing your

songs and clap at the same moment… Read full post »

On June 16 Wendi and I are able to sit in the first overflow room primarily due to strawberries. The benches of onlookers have already been fille… Read full post »

I was shot at once.

In the 1990’s I taught English at a Korean University, and during their winter break I took a three-month trip to Southeast Asia. In Cambodia I observed people walking through the markets with AK-47 assault rifles and… Read full post »

Favorite word – jouissance.

Least favorite word – crusader. (considering some of the medieval crusaders were cannibals, for example.)

Turn Ons – stars on a clear summer night, alpine flowers, someone playing guitar in a foreign country on new year’s eve, notes on a p… Read full post »

 Yesterday my friend Wendi was speaking about the way primitive cultures used to have ceremonies where they danced, inhaled from pipes, and found ways to take the edge off of ordinary community life. And right around the corner we ran into the Howard (How Weird!) Str… Read full post »

 I come from a land of tragedy called Afghanistan. —Malalai Joya

The truth is like the sun: when it comes up nobody can block it out or hide it.

—Afghan proverb

Imagine yourself twenty-five, female, the youngest member… Read full post »

--Daniel Ellsberg

I wasn’t expecting, when I went to an early screening of the new documentary, The Most Dangerous Man in America, to see a white… Read full post »

I can't even paraphrase this.  It’s that good. 

Note: I'm posting a link here to Malusinka’s article because, as someone who spent considerable time living in Haiti, she also has some very interesting things to say about the situation. Read full post »

If Katie Couric asked me,“what do you read?” [on opensalon] I might be tempted to stumble, and say defensively, “all of them.” Although it would not be (quite) true.

I wasn’t going to make a list of “favorites” for the year because I knew I couldn’t inc… Read full post »

   _{(Credit to www.armscontrolcenter.org)}

 “Is it possible, finally, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?”

--Haruki Murakami

 Two years ago next month I started writing letters on salon, which evolved, a… Read full post »

  

In October, 2007, I moved to San Francisco and discovered, in my neighborhood, a local literary festival called Litquake.  The event I stumbled on was the litcrawl where, in over two dozen venues along Valencia, Guerrero in the mission, poets, memoirists, playwrig/… Read full post »

I found the above song on YouTube, a song written by Joe Hill for Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. I remember reading that Hillary Clinton when she was feeling frustrated and stunted by her role as first lady in the 1990’s would have conversations with… Read full post »

you start small

chipping away at civic pride

cutting into budgets to schools, to children and teachers;

erecting gaudy monuments to fire fighters who

died September 11

(but forgetting to insure the ones who showed up that day to help

but weren’t offici… Read full post »

(or Obama Remark on Black Scholar’s Arrest Angers Cops)

cops were mad when one of their own

a good guy in blue who took the mad professor

down

for yelling when they wanted to

arrest him for breaking into his

own home

and the man who was… Read full post »