Anecdotal Evidence

You Can’t Take It With You: On Being Young and Middle Aged

[17.Dec.02] :. I’m pretty sure it’s because I have mono. Spending all this time horizontal, having to pare my life down to what I can manage to accomplish before I collapse back into bed. If that doesn’t get one to thinking about all the unhappy accidents that come with a body, I don’t know what will. The most unhappy of the aforementioned accidents is, of course, mortality. But I’m not worried about death, necessarily. I’m worried about acting my age.

My parents raised me in rural Maine, and they wouldn’t let me watch television for a reason: it was the mid ‘70s, and they thought that without the corruption of the city and mass culture their children would be more imaginative, more centered, more independent. There were a lot of people who thought like that in those days; from the first wave feminists (fashion magazines breed low…

Appetite: Pop Culture’s Urge to Purge

[25.Sep.02] :. The summer after the seventh grade I used to steal my sister’s dubbed copy of Appetite for Destruction and lay out on the lawn with my Walkman turned up all the way. My parents were already getting hit by the first wave of my sister’s burgeoning delinquency, but they never could have dreamed that their docile oldest would resort to theft and secrecy just to hear W. Axl Rose spit “I want to watch you bleed” into her sweet ears.

But for my time with the Walkman it was a quiet summer for me, in 1987. We had just moved from our house in the country to a place in much more suburban southern Maine, and I was waiting to start a new school. I remember feeling confused by the grid of our neighborhood, with houses and yards like glass boxes I could look into…

Ham and Eggs:  On Experimental Film and Foreignness

[17.Jul.02] :. Americans don't like to feel estranged at the movies. The movies are our home turf

Via Chicago

[20.Mar.02] :. They just quietly took the revolution into their own hands because they wanted to make music as they pleased.

Can Chuck D Speak? Rap, Race, and Rant

[22.Jan.02] :. . . . (W)hat happened that evening did not happen only to Chuck D or only to his audience, but what happened -- or what was mean to happen -- instead just snapped and slacked and fell in the air between us.

Real Consequence

[8.Oct.01] :. .