Archive for September, 2007

Kanye, my brother?

I had always liked Kanye West but the like turned to love on Sept. 2, 2005 when he veered off script at the Concert for Hurricane Relief and spoke the truth: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” His new song, “Stronger,” has been rattling around in my head, lyrics so catchy they are rump-shakin […]

Gardening in the desert, late-summer 2007 edition

As a child, I hated working in the garden. Gardening in those days meant pulling up weeds and chucking rocks from my parents’ ever-increasing vegetable patch in the back yard of our home, which was situated on a bench at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains in northern Utah. This bench had long ago been […]

Over the counter culture

Labor Day weekend in San Francisco is always fairly quiet because all the cool kids have packed their fur-covered beach cruisers, art projects and drug collections into their gas guzzling SUV’s with “No Blood For Oil!” bumper stickers and caravaned over to Black Rock Desert, Nevada, for the annual non-conformist, anti-capitalist, pro-anarchist, pro-nudity, post-modern, pre-Armageddon […]

Dave, I’m Home

It has been eight months since my last post for The Great Whatsit. During that time, here’s what’s been happening with me: My relationship of nearly ten years, with the woman I’d hoped to be with for years to come, ended. I left a decade-long freelance career I liked and was good at for a […]

Americans in Paris, part I

Abigail Adams was nearly 40 years old when she first saw Paris. It was 1784. Her husband had helped negotiate a peace treaty — the Treaty of Paris — the previous year. He was still in Europe, along with Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, to help secure commercial treaties with the new United States. When […]

Objectification of desire: part one

We love stuff. In spite of our declared aspirations to be clutter-free, eco-friendly, and economical, we surround ourselves with objects of function, entertainment, and occasional beauty. I have gone through many phases of object-worship, verging on being a pack rat and a collectoholic. My favorite repository of stuff is the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), […]

Thursday open thread: Citrus edition

I have been saving this for you for weeks and weeks. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO93C5VH8Fg[/youtube] Bonus: The installation of a couple of the pieces in the Richard Serra retrospective at MoMA. It closes next Monday; if you haven’t seen it, it’s worth making an effort. I recommend the free audio guide — Serra is unusually lucid about his […]

ForLoveNotMoney 2.0

To be an amateur in the U.S. is to be second rate. The reasoning goes that if one were a better writer, musician, or painter, a career in the arts would necessarily be in order. The professional is lauded – is taken seriously. Things, however, weren’t always this way. Until the mid-to-late 19th century, amateurism […]

Housekeeping

September still feels like the beginning of the year for me, and in any case there are a few points that we here at headquarters would like to put out for discussion. First, I think she was trying to slip out quietly, but our beloved Pandora Brewer is going on hiatus. She’ll still be around […]

Withold yer labor

Labor Day in the Hamptons, 1987. Who’s yer favorite character? [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wfSgSvDBSg[/youtube] And where were you twenty years ago today?