How to pack

Tomorrow, I’m flying to Chicago to pick up a van that Rosalie’s aunt is very kindly giving us (we haven’t had a car in a while). I’ll be driving the van back, which is a 2100 mile drive, at least on the route I’m taking, which will take me from freezing, possibly snowing Chicago, all […]

Dick move.

Sometime early Monday morning, my old friend and collaborator Tommy Marth committed suicide. What a prick. And Tommy was a prick, make no mistake. It was his chief public characteristic. He was cynical, sarcastic, caustic as industrial solvent. The day he met my wife Rosalie, he walked up and said “So this is the stupid bitch […]

Common People

We’re rednecks, rednecks We don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground Rednecks, rednecks, We keepin’ the niggers down. –Randy Newman, “Rednecks” What do you have when you come from a poor-white background? And from a place where Reconstruction didn’t end until the 1950s. If you came from people often referred to on campuses as […]

A review of Lana Del Rey’s Born To Die, in the guise of an open letter to music bloggers

Dear hip music bloggers, Fuck off and die. I can just see all of you, sitting in your little rooms in the weeks since Lana Del Rey’s disastrous appearance on Saturday Night Live, coming up with the clever little bon mots you planned to sprinkle all throughout your review of Del Rey’s debut album, Born […]