THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

If I'm not mistaken, I believe this picture is from the 1988 Roscommon High School yearbook. The guy on the right with his eyes shut -- as many of my pictures from this era seem to feature, as if I was constantly dreaming my life -- is me. The name of the young lady in the middle is lost to the fog of my memory, sadly. But the guy in the lower right is Brent Koschtial, with whom I graduated that year. Two young adolescent males, both in the Academic Top 10 of the class, with the best in life yet to come. Or at least that's what I thought for me at the time. Because if you wanted to be a kid in Roscommon in the mid to late '80s with the best in life already in place, you wanted to be Brent Koschtial. He checked all the boxes -- handsome and athletic, personable and intelligent, dating the girl everyone wanted to date -- that I could never hope to tick. And best of all, he wasn't a dick when he certainly could have been one, given his clear superiority to nearly ever...

Late last night, I saw this post on Facebook that showed a gift to Governor Rick Snyder from the NCMC Fab Lab, a mobile digital fabrication lab that was on a downstate tour to promote awareness of STEM-related vo-tech applications (and most likely shake out some funding dollars in the process). Me being me, I immediately thought of some responses to that FB post that my wife wisely shot down, for fear of the repercussions of such spontaneous smart-assery. The cutting room floor had the following witticisms: (a) "That's a nice paperweight! Was it used to hold down the anti-homosexual-adoption bill you recently signed, just like your signature was used to hold down homosexuals?" (b) "That's a nice paperweight! The next time you shift funds from community colleges to corporate interests, remember who made that paperweight!" Neither comment is really that literally and/or figuratively funny, sadly. Snyder and the Republican legislature, larded with money...

Recently I've been reading a new book by Michaelangelo Matos called The Underground Is Massive: How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America , and one of the problems with reading a book like this is that there are continuous references to music that I immediately have to track down on YouTube, so the first two chapters have been a stop-start experience that has opened my ears to a lot of great old music ("Space Invaders" by Player 1, I'm talking about you). The initial sections of the book have spent a lot of time in '80s Detroit, where techno musicians great and small first fleshed out the branch of EDM known as techno that ultimately got a hometown global showcase called the Detroit Electronic Music Festival starting in 2000. Speaking of the DEMF, my friend Brian Siers and I once did some on-camera work interviewing festival goers -- among other things, I recall an extended sit-down with "Strings Of Life" auteur Derrick May, who did the interview wi...

In fiction, when given the choice between utopia and dystopia, I tend to fall into the more pessimistic camp. At the movies, whether it's lighter (as in Mad Max: Fury Road , a film you should see in IMAX RIGHT F*CKING NOW) or a bit darker and sardonic (as in Terry Gilliam's cut of Brazil ), dystopian visions seem more realistic. Which is more likely to come to fruition years from now -- the gleaming electronics of Prometheus or the dessicated dank of Alien ? The future strikes me as more likely to be parched and rusting, the beginning of WALL-E rather than the end, and while I hope for otherwise, I'm preparing for the worst. In the dystopian literature that I've actually read, there is only one masterpiece: The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Relentless in tone and economical in prose, it's the kind of work that I wholeheartedly recommend to everyone despite the knowledge that it might devastate the reader with images that you'll never be able to shake. (I even bou...

Aside from a brief snapshot of throwing a small can of tomato paste at my mother's head for no obvious reason, most of my earliest memories consist of trying to make people laugh in any way possible. I used the tools that were available to me: my body for standard physical humor -- passing gas through any bodily orifice and variations of "baby fall down" were hoary chestnuts of mirth and merriment -- and my voice for imitations of things I saw and heard. This means that the standard vocal go-to's were pretty typical for a socially awkward skinny white male of a certain age and time -- lines from movies ( Caddyshack , Blazing Saddles , the Monty Python catalog), quotes from television (especially Looney Tunes / Merrie Melodies ,  SNL and The Simpsons ), and so forth -- and while I'd like to say things have changed from then to now, they really haven't. They really haven't. As the spark of singular creation is largely absent in me, I've always been ...

Around the age of 16, I discovered I could dunk a basketball, and the game of basketball suddenly became a bit more fun. When it comes to dunking, most people jump off both feet, leaping towards the hoop via an elegant synchronicity of upper and lower musculature. Sadly, I never had that strong a frame -- my standard joke has always been that I have the body of a 13-year-old African girl, and in my teen years, that wasn't far off -- so I dunked off one foot, pushing off with my left leg. At my jumping peak, I had around a 34" vertical leap, and dunking was relatively easy for a while. Just under twenty years, to be exact. But when you dunk off one leg, that leg will twist in the socket like a mortar and pestle, with each twist grinding a bit of cartilage into nothing. And when you combine thousands of those twists over years of basketball with the odd now-and-again acute trauma -- such as the occasional undercut causing me to crash to the ground -- you end up with bone-on-bo...

After wavering for a couple of years, my friend Brian Siers and I decided to finally make the trip out west in 2004 to a festival called Coachella, about a half-hour east of Palm Springs in a sleepy dessicated burg called Indio. At the time, it was a two-day weekend festival -- the first night featured Radiohead and The Pixies, while The Cure headlined the second night. (I remember lots of things from that weekend, but I still chuckle when I think about Dick Valentine from the band Electric Six thanking Radiohead for being their opening act.) On that first adventure, we didn’t really know what we were doing -- we drove from San Diego instead of Los Angeles, we had no OTC painkillers, we stayed far away from the festival, we were stuck in traffic for hours, and so on -- but we still had a great time. As we came back year after year, our Coachella game got better and better, as we fine-tuned each and every aspect of our adventures. And while the music remained compelling, the trip b...