Humoring Through Writing
The first day of the hearings to confirm Supreme Court hopeful, Justice Brett Kavanaugh was filled with incessant disruption. Women stood outside of the building cloaked in long, capillary red robes and white wimples like handmaidens from Margaret Atwood’s dystopian, though not feeling too far-fetched now, fiction. Inside the proceedings, protesters, largely women, brandished signs, […]
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Ben Harper looks like he is about to cry. Harper is a blues/rock/indie guitarist who has been making music since the early-1990s. Tall, lean, and with chiseled features that make him look like he is clipped from the pages of a superhero comic book, Harper is an imposing figure. From where I’m sitting underneath the […]
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“Life finds a way,” says Jeff Goldblum as the wry, arch, very Goldblum-y character Dr. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park. He’s referring to the naïve notion that the scientists actually have a handle on population control in the Dino-park, that they can somehow put a leash on the dinosaurs’ breeding habits, which would not only […]
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Parked in my driveway with my face resting on the steering wheel, to the casual passerby I probably looked like the “after” in an Ambien ad. I was listening so intently to the radio that I had my face mashed as close to the speaker as it could get. It was an interview on NPR’s […]
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I’m not interested in church for the religion as much as I am for the variety. Visit a city or even a mid-size town and pop into a few of these institutions and you’ll see what I mean. Some resemble medieval castles with their lethal spirals and flying buttresses while others are modest boxy things […]
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Every city has its kink, its pockets of oddball charm like the shag rug underneath the grand piano. Seattle has an entire second subterranean city sunk underneath its streets. New Orleans encourages graveyard tourism. Los Angeles is block after creepy block lifted from a David Lynch film. Boston has Graffiti Alley—funk central in the form […]
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Laura Dwight started keeping a mental inventory of all the ways her once great neighborhood in Boston’s Back Bay was headed for the garbage chute– crumbling front stoops, broken gates, dirt and litter patches passing for gardens and flower beds. She lived in the Back Bay, the tidy track of streets surrounding Newbury St, Boston’s […]
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