a blind flaneur

Many Americans feel a disturbing sense of distrust and déjà vu about the crisis de jour. We’ve been through this before, repeatedly. Doing the Bum’s Rush is George W. Bush’s Presidential style. Remember his admonition that “the smoking gun might be a mushroom  cloud” during the war-drumming that led us into Iraq?He cooked the books […]

One of this year’s MacArthur Foundation Fellows, recipients of the so-called “genius grants,” is San Francisco sound artist Walter Kitundu. His kinetic sculptures have a whimsical elegance reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp, and his musical instruments sound as earthy and iconoclastic as Harry Partch with a hip-hop twist. He uses old turntables as part of the […]

I must confess, as did On The Media’s Bob Garfield, that until last week “I’d never read a single word of David Foster Wallace’s work because he’s reputed as a novelist to be very dense and difficult, along Thomas Pynchon/James Joyce lines, and I didn’t even know he did journalism. But …, I’ve been […]

I’m a week and a day late with this one, but Hurricane Ike slowed me down a bit. May your Monday morning feel as alive as Saturday Night.

Thanks to Kestrell at Reading in the Dark for turning me on to this open source accessibility solution for Linux. She writes, “I am really excited about this. Adept1 is the accessible Linux OS I have been beta testing for the past year or so. It is accessible through both keyboard and voice, and the […]

Wait a minute, those barbarians at the gate, they don’t look like Jacobins. They’re wearing Armani suits. They’re investment bankers, tired of toxic debt, demanding a bail out!
About the image: Prise de la Bastille by Jean-Pierre-Louis-Laurent Houel [Source: Wikimedia Commons]
Read Surfacing at Place de la Bastille and Fashionista Street: Selling Short

Rushdie On Calvino’s Absurd, Charming Masterpiece : NPR: “In 1965, the great Italian writer Italo Calvino — in a light, fantastic collection of 12 short stories, titled Cosmicomics — took on nothing less than the creation of the universe.
“I first read Cosmicomics in my early 20s, and it’s a book I’ve gone back to again […]

I was enchanted by the voice of Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, an Australian aboriginal singer who is blind, when I heard a profile about him on PRI’s The World:
Gurrumul… sings in his native language - Yolngu Matha. And his songs aren’t about the sad fate of the aborigines or the hard life of the outback. They’re […]

Dupont Circle is the central coordinate of the neighbhorhood I call home when I’m in Washington. It’s fertile ground for a flaneur, and I’ve witnessed some strange stuff go down around the fountain there — the bike messengers, the crack dealers, the homeless vets in ponchos and bandannas, Sarge and Pigeon Water Man, the guy […]

We do tornadoes in Ohio. Usually they come and go before you know one is in the neighborhood. So it was a surprise Sunday when the remnants of Hurricane Ike arrived with winds exceeding 75 mph. It was surreal — the sun was shining, the wind was blasting, trees were snapping, and it went on […]