I spent most of yesterday trying to intellectualise the outcome, but it comes down to three things, racism, sexism and privilege.

Dazed, I turned only to see said chorus approaching, grinning, with one of them rapping the words “Slam Slam Cinderella.” To add to the surreal quality of the event: I didn’t feel humiliated.

She worked as a nanny and she may be one of the greatest street photographers of the mid 20th Century. She was an enigmatic woman who took pictures in synchronicity with the time and flavor of Robert Frank.  But she didn’t seem to print any of her work, it all […]

Halfway down the mountain between my house and town is a stretch of road that looks like it ends in a house.  It doesn’t of course, rather it curves in front of it like the arced track of an amusement park ride.  The people who live there are Charlie and […]

In October of 1955, Allen Ginsberg read a poem in San Francisco that electrified the audience.  This poem was successful as soon as it came out.  It is as pertinent today as anything. HOWL by Allen Ginsberg I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical […]

My town has a dump with its very own boutique called the “swap shop”.  No one is too proud to rummage around in there to find a rare treasure.  I’ve found three.  A vintage black leather motorcycle jacket, two boxes of original and re-pressed recordings of Delta blues, and a […]

I was chosen for jury duty on September 10.   The rest  of the prospective jurors were allowed to leave and resume their lives and for some of them, I guess, their jobs in the nearby World Trade Center.  Having to submit to the inevitability of jury duty, I left  the […]

In the heaven of Indra, there is said to be a network of pearls, so arranged that if you look at one you see all the others reflected in it. In the same way, each object in the world is not merely itself but involves every other object and in […]

After buying the old farmhouse at the end of March, I quickly went around to its back to look at what I had really purchased it for.  Because, although the house was very old and pretty in a vernacularly plain way, the property upon which the house sat was the […]

The Huffington Post has gone Vegas. It has instituted a clever way to have commenters engage in what can only be seen as a form of slot machine gambling.  I noticed this  after learning HP had started some kind of  “badges” system.  I visited the site and saw a curious […]

The man on the motorcycle is dead.  He was twenty-two, a motorcycle enthusiast, murdered and from Puerto Rico.  His wish was to be embalmed and posed this way and his wish, like the wish of another murdered twenty-four year old in this country (posed standing upright in his mother’s living […]

A 20-something photographer professional acquaintance of mine, a twin, came to me and disclosed a litany of things that weren’t going well:  a male friend who had an ambivalent approach-avoid response to her, not sure if he wanted to be a friend or a lover but nonetheless could not stop […]

I was chosen for jury duty on September 10.   The rest were allowed to leave and resume their lives and for some of them, their jobs in the nearby World Trade Center.  Having to submit to the inevitability of jury duty, I left  the courthouse and gave myself a lemons-into-lemonade […]