• Gezi Park

    Fire in Istanbul, Rain in Vienna: An Inside look at Unrest in Turkey

    This protest, in its rapid expansion, has grown to defy any specific cause. A list of several might do the job: A park under peril from construction, dead protesters – or rumors of dead protesters – and police brutality in general, especially after the extreme violence of the May Day gatherings. Then there’s Prime Minister Erdogan’s [...]

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    The Cuban Doctor and His American Taxi

    I’ve been to Cuba three times. On each trip I planned to visit the island from one end to the other, but the attraction of Havana always ended up putting pay to such plans. Even so, I still made it to Matanzas, Cienfuegos, Viñales Valley, Cayo Largo and Varadero. Arriving in Havana can mark visitors [...]

  • Turkey Komunists-4

    An Anarchist Outsider Amongst Türkiye Komünists

    Istanbul exists separate from Europe and Asia. From Tophane, where the Bosphorous meets the Mediterranean, or the Eurocentric streets of Taksim, it’s easy to find oneself staring at the horizon from a roof terrace, ringed by fresh skyscrapers and the lofty spires of mosques as the evening prayer surrounds you. The calls are dissimilar and [...]

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108058485_7dc1d6835a

The Cuban Doctor and His American Taxi

I’ve been to Cuba three times. On each trip I planned to visit the island from one end to the other, but the attraction of Havana always ended up putting pay to such plans. Even so, I still made it to Matanzas, Cienfuegos, Viñales Valley, Cayo Largo and Varadero. Arriving in Havana can mark visitors [...]

Turkey Komunists-4

An Anarchist Outsider Amongst Türkiye Komünists

Istanbul exists separate from Europe and Asia. From Tophane, where the Bosphorous meets the Mediterranean, or the Eurocentric streets of Taksim, it’s easy to find oneself staring at the horizon from a roof terrace, ringed by fresh skyscrapers and the lofty spires of mosques as the evening prayer surrounds you. The calls are dissimilar and [...]

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Are We There Yet? A Reading of Paul Legault

Near the end of his prescient 1990 essay, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” David Foster Wallace discusses who the new “real rebels” of American fiction will be after postmodernism, and what their writing will look like, speculating that, “The new rebels might be the ones willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, [...]

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Chanté, You Stay: Pride in the LBC

Sunday’s Pride parade demonstrated the fact that Long Beach is truly one of the most diverse cities in the world.  All colors of the rainbow were beaming as they took to the streets. The Dikes on Bikes roared by, fists raised in the air. Gay veterans marched in step honoring the country they served, as [...]

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The Witch Is Dead

The hag has been put in hagiography. U.S. coverage of the death of Margaret Thatcher has been uniformly fawning, revisionist drool. I awoke to the news this morning, accompanied by Joe Scarborough’s fatuous and specious claims that anti-Thatcher sentiment was, and is something that could be confined to his classist idea of ‘the North’ of [...]

Neil deGrasse Tyson Says The US Has Stopped Dreaming

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson argues that without better funding for NASA the imagination and technological future of the United States is in jeopardy. What do you think? Part 2.

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Oscar Pistorius and Journalism by Archetype

Now that Oscar Pistorius has been charged with the murder of his ‘model girlfriend’ Reeva Steenkamp, the appellation given him, Blade Runner, is too ironic for good taste. The crass mythic characterization of Pistorius as ‘the Bionic Man’ and Nike’s ‘Bullet in the Chamber’ and now, according to some very unpleasant Internet mythography, as ‘the [...]

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Big Data And Why Spielberg Don’t Know Dick

A problem with philosophically charged reviews of sci-fi films is that they often treat technology as either an extension of an ancient question or secondary to the quandary at hand. Upon a recent viewing of Steven Spielberg’s dystopian thriller Minority Report, based on the Philip K. Dick short story, my online hunt for a review venturing beyond [...]

McNeill and Burroughs: Ah Pook Is Here

OBSERVED WHILE FALLING: Bill Burroughs, Ah Pook, and Me’ & THE LOST ART OF AH POOK IS HERE: Images From The Graphic Novel’ by Malcolm McNeill; Fantagraphics, November 2012. William S. Burroughs’ The Soft Machine, inaugural novel of what would become his “Nova Trilogy” (also including The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express) arrived on [...]

Dirty Wars: Jeremy Scahill and Rick Rowley’s Film About US Covert Warfare

Jeremy Scahill, investigative reporter for the Nation and author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful mercenary Army, has teamed up with director Rick Rowley for a new documentary called “Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield,” which is being screened this weekend at the Sundance film festival. The film follows Scahill as he [...]

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ANGELA CARTER’S THE PASSION OF NEW EVE

Angela Carter’s anti-mythic The Passion of New Eve (1977) is a novel that, for me, resides in easy company with Jean-Luc Godard’s new wave Weekend (1967) and Derek Jarman’s post-punk Jubilee (1978). Visually, with its hysterical sexually dimorphic revolutionaries, graffiti, machine guns, dystopian landscapes, surgical Sadomasochism and improvised guerrilla skirmishes The Passion of New Eve [...]

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Brilliant New Cover Art For Orwell’s 1984

  The cover art for Penguin’s latest edition of George Orwell’s classic dystopian tale is fantastic! Designer David Pearson said that the design went through numerous iterations as to, “Establish just the right amount of print obliteration. Eventually we settled on printing and debossing, as per the Great Ideas series [Why I Write shown, above], with the [...]