What’s Funnier?

1) The fact that ABC news took James Lipton’s biography, read about the man’s entire life, his hopes and dreams, his accomplishments and tragedies, and took away from it one single fact which was deemed newsworthy. Quote: “James Lipton, the host of U.S. talk show, Inside the Actors’ Studio, once worked as a pimp in Paris, France.”

2) The fact that James Lipton, the host of U.S. talk show, Inside the Actors’ Studio, once worked as a pimp in Paris, France. If the Lipton of youth was at all similar to the Lipton of age, these must have been some of the most hysterically tumescent and malapropos transactions in the history of prostitution.

3) The fact that no matter what we make of our lives, no matter the peaks we climb, no matter our achievements, in the quiet hours, or in the twilight, we look back on the reckless and depraved things we’ve done, the things mothers immemorial have assured us we should be ashamed of, with such a smirking swell of romantic pride… that we act as if the person we once were, the one who did all those “stupid” things and who made all those crazy “mistakes,” were a dead ancestor who through sheer force of nostalgic time-refracted longing remains more alive than we the living… or that we cherish so sweetly the dead pimps inside of ourselves.

10.25. filed under: inquiries. 5


Excuse me Mr. Andy Rooney, for furrowing my unkempt eyebrows, and muscling in on your turf here, but- I’d like to ask a silly question to the world at large… Why is it the purveyors of movie magic, who have mastered all facets of genetics and technology, who can mold flesh like clay, who can mutate and evolve creatures at will, who plumb deep space and animate alien life, who can set loose all manner of creeping death and leaping horror, who can obliterate planets, set hordes in motion, bring the dead to shambling life, who hold sway over the cataclysmic forces of nature, who have dominion over the very fabric of space and time itself and can as such pretty convincingly re-shape reality in any manner necessary… why can’t people with these incredible powers manage to composite a single believable looking family photo?

08.27. filed under: inquiries. 5


Testing the staying power of whackness

Or, Take It Off 17 years later

Very nearly 20 years ago now De La Soul released the classic 3 feet high and rising. One of the many skits/throw-away tracks which filled out the record was Take it off in which the gang, in call and response style, pointed out a selection of whack fashion items they were sick of seeing. (It takes real conviction to forever mark your taste by imprinting it in hot wax! No turning back after that.) Fashion, being what it is, both fickle and recursive I thought that perhaps it was time to re-visit the items and see whether they are still hopelessly whack or, if on the magical valuation scale of fashion, which can change an items status from homeless guy’s ass-cloth to couture and back again in mere months, they had perhaps become dope, fly, or even fresh again. See below.

08.23. filed under: !. inquiries. life. play.


What’s so funny anyway?

I find myself less amused by the opening segments of Comedy Central’s weeknight double-punch of fake news lately. I can’t help but wonder whether programs like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, which have us laughing at the ineptitude, corruption, war mongering, and profiteering of our Government, are in some way diffusing what ought to be a steadily building anger; an anger which by all rights ought to be seeking a vent right about now.

07.26. filed under: !. inquiries. observations. 8


What if I wrote a single sentence each day? Would the sentences add up to a novel? No.  A poem? No. And why does escape seem impossible? What if I retreated into non-sequiturs? What if I scribbled on paper and hooted in guttural bursts? Why can’t I? You can. And why the tendency to align, to repeat, to perpetuate? Why does it naturally become this and not something totally different? Why couldn’t it be something nimble enough to avoid the pin and the shadow box? I can’t say. And what if I wanted to tear it all down? You have. You’ve torn it down and built it up again. So why doesn’t it change? Because it is you.

07.09. filed under: !. inquiries. personal. 7


Trickle-down affections

Or: do celebrity archetypes inform our snap-judgments?

No matter how hard we humans play at ideas like open-mindedness, reservation of judgement, and rationality we can’t help ourselves but to make instantaneous snap-judgments about things. That’s no damnation, it’s just the way our brains work. We see something new and our industrious little minds seek connections and corollaries. If our minds find acceptably concrete evidence lacking, they simply move down a tier, from direct experience to indirect, and make whatever connections seem most likely. Our minds have no qualms about simply guesstimate and making the closest match they can manage. It’s how we categorize the world around us and make sense of reality.

06.23. filed under: !. inquiries. life. people. 3


Some ramblings about American culture.

What would you call something which, having become poisoned and yet dominant, seems to impede, in its way, the further forward development of human culture at large, the hard won notions of the enlightenment, the happiness of individuals everywhere, and possibly the advancement of the species as a whole? I call it American culture.



Some ramblings about appearances

Shabby-chic or just plain shabby?

How is it that the average man of the 21st century has been raised up, in wealth, in holdings, in leisure time, in education, in rights, to levels on par with court members and landed gentry of earlier ages, but in respect to finery has sunk to the level of serf? Were even the least noble member of the humblest nation’s aristocracy of 5 centuries ago to meet a working man of today, though perhaps on par with him in wealth and below him in education, the noble would be forgiven for mistaking this average Joe for a barrowman.

06.17. filed under: !. humanity. inquiries. observations. 2