I asked my soul: What is Delhi? She replied: The world is the body and Delhi its life. –The poet Ghalib quoted in Khushwant Singh’s Delhi: a Novel It was almost ten years ago but I don’t suppose I’ll ever forget the first time I arrived in Delhi. This was back in the day before [...]
In the summer of 1995, I was 19 years old, living on my own a few blocks from the sea in Isla Vista, a suburb of Santa Barbara, adjunct to the city’s university. Though I had summer school classes and a job, it was a good time for me. Romantically, I was unattached, my bout [...]
As far as years in music go, 1970 was a good one: Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush, Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, and Iggy Pop & The Stooges’s Fun House were all released, as were swan song LPs for The Beatles, The Velvet Underground, and Simon & Garfunkel, while John Lennon and George Harrison launched their [...]
While vacationing at my mother’s house in the Virginia countryside this summer I decided it might be appropriate to check out Terrence Malick’s The New World from the local library. Though I truly love Tree of Life and rather like his earlier films I nevertheless didn’t have high expectations. It’s almost a given that Hollywood [...]
Although globalization has accelerated the process that colonialism began— integrating and importing different cultures and people into foreign lands— America remains foremost among the world as a nation of immigrants. The indigenous excepted of course, all Americans come from somewhere else. The ancestors that founded our American lines thus once upon a time endured a [...]
“Who could conquer Tenochtitlan? Who could shake the foundation of heaven…?” It is the winter of 1519 and there is much ado in Old Worlds and New: the Roman Papacy, led by Leo X is doing its best to suppress a renegade heretic named Martin Luther from spreading his blasphemies; Ferdinand Magellan is outfitting [...]
Consider this situation: a woman wants to leave her country to live abroad, only her husband refuses to go along with the plan. He wants to stay put in the big city they live in, most importantly because his ailing father suffers from advanced Alzheimer’s. This point of difference being irreconcilable, they decide on a [...]
Of all the major metropolitan cities in America, none deserve the misanthrope’s fury more than Los Angeles. After all, what urban area better represents the false promises of contemporary American Dreams than the one that declares you’re special and deserve your own TV show, only to exchange that dangling carrot for a dishwasher’s rag or [...]
When we consider a society of grotesque economic contrasts, Paris, autumn, 1788, is a fine starting point. France had its own 99%–in fact, less than one half of one percent of the population belonged to a noble family. They sequestered themselves in large estates or the proverbial ivory tower. Imagine starving mobs roaming septic gutters [...]
Because we live in a 24-hour news cycle you’ve probably heard the story slipped in somewhere between nuclear contamination fears, carnage in Afghanistan and sexual indiscretions of Republican candidates—2005 YU55, a massive asteroid four hundred meters in diameter will pass within the orbit of the moon on November 8th. It’s the closest an asteroid this [...]
“You are excrement. You can change yourself into gold.” — Jodorowsky’s Alchemist Cinema was developed more than a hundred years ago with purely entertainment purposes in mind: it was a way for an entrepreneur to make a buck. However, it didn’t take the State too long to discover its manifest possibilities as a tool of [...]
“Everybody passing through here is somebody, if nobody in the outside world.” — Patti Smith, Just Kids In one of my favorite scenes in Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee [...]
That Jonathan Franzen’s fourth novel, Freedom, debuted at #1 on the Fiction section of the New York Times Bestsellers List in September last year is one of those phenomenal outliers that defy the logic of free market capitalism. It’s not that it has no business being #1 when the spot is usually held by the [...]
“You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?” — David Byrne “When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you [...]
