As the saying goes, “If you remember the ’90s, you were there and bored.” That’s unless you were a reader of an inky supermarket tabloid that boasted headlines about the fabled “Bat Boy” and other “journalistic” meshugas that instantly turned your coffee table into a Ripley’s Believe it, Or Not exhibit. Well, believe it or not—it’s back: The Weekly World […]
James Bond just underwent a redemptive reckoning onscreen. The latest iteration of Superman is, as the New York Times reports, “Up, up and out of the closet.” Rebranding cultural icons seems all the rage. And not just for superheroes. Many public-facing entities have endeavored to refresh their image, some to fix longstanding cultural offenses—looking at you, […]
Until this week, the only thing Rodney Dangerfield and I had in common was a penchant for one-liners and general anxiety about our respectability. Then we both went “back to school.” His experience was fictional—apart from the cameo by a real-life Kurt Vonnegut—and arrived in the local cineplex as the movie Back to School. My back-to-school […]
Like every other writer I know, I’m the voice of my generation. Apparently, my voice just isn’t loud enough to overcome our collective screams of desperation. That said, I feel obligated to continue trying, partly because I have the rare privilege of being a writer with a day job, which is being a writer—but with some […]
Remember writing in cafes? My own obsession began with Christine’s Cafe in Petaluma in the mid-’80s but quickly metastasized into San Anselmo’s Cafe Nuvo and finally into San Francisco’s North Beach. This is where my cohorts and I vainly searched for traces of the Beats, who, by the early ’90s, were so heavily productized and […]