The reason Jack Kerouac novels and, in recent years, Roberto Bolaño novels are always in demand — virtually jumping off the shelves at used bookstores across the country — is because they depict characters who refuse to relinquish their poetic vision of life and the world to the Moloch maw…

There is no bioregion on Earth that is boring. All are dynamic and full of inexhaustible mysteries. Airplanes are carbon dragons. They are but one of many destroyers woven into the world we were born into, of course. I mean, where to begin? Lives dependent on habitat destruction and the…

One reason social media use may decline in coming years is because the hours we spend on it (viewing novel things, exchanging opinions and expressions of emotions, bickering, congratulating, thinking out loud, crafting sentences, tapping like and love emojis) do not generate new sense memories. I, for example, I have…

If one of the principal or perhaps the principal charm of music is that of theme and variation, it stands to reason that the original musical or musical-lyrical theme stated must bear a certain fierce originality from which to develop the variations. The fierce originality to which I refer does…

So much of the art that truly moves us portrays the unsolvable dilemma: Betray the self or perish. This is because we live in a system which requires us to betray our ethics and our instincts (toward compassion, toward play, toward reciprocity with nature) if we wish to survive. Failure…

We hear about the death of Queen Elizabeth and view the pomp and circumstance. Given what we understand about the globalized military terror that was necessary to launch and maintain the British Empire — upon which, famously, “the sun never set” — all the ceremony and emotion wrapped around the…

In the not-too-distant future, there will be only one theme for our art to speak of. The changes brought about by the abrupt transfer of carbon and methane from their subterranean holds into the delicate tissue of the Earth atmosphere, coupled with the mass-scale, terrifying habitat destruction & species reduction…

It’s interesting — and tragic — that the writers of the US Constitution rejected the divine right of kings, but not the opulence, excess, exploitation, extreme greed, dizzying hierarchy & mentality of war and conquest that the European monarchies and landed aristocracies had pursued previous to capitalism. The founders merely…

I saw an image of alt-right activist troll Mike Cernovich in front of a medieval painting of an angel and I thought how interesting it is that you can make it your life’s vocation to be a cruel, deceptive, hateful person and yet the resonant power of a religious symbol…