Blog Archives
Striking Slaves, Stinging Bees
You might not know it, but here in America we’re nearly one full month into a prison workers’ strike that began on September 9 on the anniversary of the Attica Uprising. I say you may not know it because the mainstream media doesn’t recognize detainees as human beings, and doesn’t think to illuminate the fact [...]
Nazis! Drugs! Madness!
Yesterday morning I came across this The Guardian author interview with Norman Ohler whose new book, Blitzed, is an exhaustive excavation of the drug culture at the center of the Third Reich. Here are a few words… …“Yes, it is strange,” he says, smiling at my giddiness. But then he has long believed in a [...]
A Is For Attica
45 years after the prison riot at Attica, we’re still learning new information about the protesters, their grievances, and the murderous suppression their revolt garnered. Attica and the events that took place there all those decades ago were purposely obscured by official lies, brutal beatings and even executions. It’s not necessarily a mainstream news story, [...]
Poems To Die For
Paris Records has produced a library of Beat recordings featuring the words of William S Burroughs, Ed Sanders, Hunter Thompson, Terry Southern and more. Here’s a bit from their website… As of this writing, Paris Records is almost 21 yrs old. With 5 new releases for 2006-2007, the impossible history of Paris records is about [...]
Manly: Mystery Master
Manly P. Hall’s The Secret Teachings of All Ages: An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy is a cornerstone book in any esoteric library worthy of the name, and Hall himself was a spiritual prodigy whose publishing and teachings helped to synthesize core ideas of Victorian spiritualism for Americans in the [...]
Still Crumblin’
This week we celebrate the birthday of comic artist R. Crumb who turned 73 on August 30. With a hat tip to my {R}emnants partner Ezra Buckley who turned me on to this article in The Paris Review… In honor of R. Crumb’s birthday today, here are a few of my favorite outtakes from his [...]
Hells History
The Hells Angels Motorcycle Club were the wild and wooly Zeligs of the American counterculture of the Vietnam Era: The Angels partied with Ken Keasey and his Merry Pranksters; they saw their reflections on the big screen in Easy Rider, and in the pages of Hunter S. Thompson’s first book; and they effectively ended the [...]
Kerouac Wax Stack
I love Open Culture’s treasure trove of free and accessible media. So many great things to find there. If you’re on Twitter you should follow OC @openculture. Every tweet is like opening a surprise and yesterday I discovered that all of Jack Kerouac’s recorded works are available for listening on the site through their curating [...]
Saint of Monsters
Casting about for a timely subject for today’s post, I learned a little something about one of the world’s most famous monsters. It turns out that one of the earliest reports of a creature living in Scotland’s Loch Ness originated from a sighting of the beast by a priest who’d go on to become a [...]
Revolutionary Black Workers
In the midst of this surreal political season, with the endurance of Black Lives Matter, and having just written an article about an African American neighborhood in Nashville, I suppose it might have been expected that I’d stumble across a mention about the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, but it still caught me by surprise. [...]
