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Posts published in “Essays”

Berlin: Full of Beauty, Devoid of Virtue

When far from home in foreign cities, slowed by saddle sores or jet leg, menaced by security pat-downs or highwaymen’s pistols, the traveler is often beset by two contending impulses: avoid your own expatriate countrymen and women like the plague or seek them out as glue for your own identity fragmenting under the strains of the journey.

Vexxed At ‘Vaxxed’: Like an Infection

An email just arrived in my inbox recently titled "The Most Controversial Film in the Country — VAXXED — Set to Open in The San Francisco Bay Area this Friday!" Why it was not in…

The Stony Lonesome: What A Shock!

I recently finished writing something that caused me, after doffing my writer's cap and donning the chapeau d'critique, to say: Dude, this is boring. Boring? the scribbler rejoined. It's not boring, it's a slice of…

Forty Years Ago

I completed my novel Inside Moves in 1975, the year the war in Vietnam ended. I had a medical deferment that saved me from going to that war. I lost friends to that needless conflagration and had…

Miles Davis: Ace Of Baseness

Must the virtuoso but virtuous? In The Republic Plato answered the question with an emphatic, uptight: yes. Most moderns by contrast are blithely willing to separate, as necessary, the musician from the music he makes.…

Hospital

Obamacare? I know nothing about it, but it seems those who hate it are the same ones who hate Obama for the usual reason. I've never had commercial medical insurance of any kind. This is…

Bring Out The Clowns

In this decade of maximum peril, a prankish God delivers two maximally detested candidates to lead the faltering nation as events run ahead of all the convenient narratives. For instance: the idea that Republican “insiders”…

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