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Posts published in “Essays”

A Message From Vietnam

(Writer’s note: I was born in 1957. As a result, the closest I came to the Vietnam War was as a child in the 1960s watching the nightly talking heads deliver the daily body count…

At F & Poe

Dorothea Puente’s Death House, Sacramento. Seven or so poor senior souls robbed of their Social Security and their lives by Madame Puente, buried in Ms. P’s boarding-house backyard. My god! 1980s. I live here in…

High-Altitude Sonic Tonic

In these days when the formerly public sphere is balkanized by billions of individualized audiotopias in which so many are plugged into their own algorithmized soundtracks, the actual choosing of music for a road trip…

The Reluctant Executioner

Robert G. Elliott was not a murderous person by nature, but he proved, no doubt to his own surprise, to be rather good at killing people. A well-groomed, silver-haired man with a pipe and a…

Over There: Isolating War Music

When war broke out in Europe in early August of 1914, that month’s edition of The Etude, America’s “Journal of the Musician, the Music Student and all Music Lovers,” had already appeared. The editor, James…

Memories Of Vietnam: The War And The Peace

“The Vietnamese national character is rapidly changing. Our value system is falling apart. Gangsters are making incredible fortunes on the black market.” – Professor Hoang Ngoc Hien, Hanoi intellectual, 1995 “We’re getting wonderful cooperation from…

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