THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

I've blogged before about one of the most influential moments in my academic life: reading State Of The World 1988 as a callow seventeen-year-old, in a Contemporary Social Problems class at Lansing Community College. Since that time, there have been new editions each year, but I'm still struck by the biggest lesson I culled from that class and that text: the myriad problems of overpopulation, from the resulting resource depletion and increases in religious fundamentalism to the deleterious effects on personal and collective self-esteem for each of our increasingly crowded and frantic denizens of Earth. One of those factors that directly impacts self-esteem, of course, is money. While some recent research has actually put a dollar amount on the upper limit of effectiveness of long green on day-to-day and longitudinal happiness, what has always interested me (as a person with a history of lower socioeconomic status, or SES) is the effect of winning a lottery, or coming into a v...

A few years back, George Saunders wrote a chillingly satirical essay entitled The Braindead Megaphone (also the title of his compendium of short non-fiction) that sadly encapsulates what passes for the majority of public discourse, especially among politicians and cable news outlets. It would be shameful if the bluster and bellicosity that stands in for intellectual debate couldn't be more frequently countered here and there by the tonic of eloquent and elegant simplicity, as in the above YouTube solution to Wisconsin's manufactured "budget crisis," allegedly created by the neolibertarian billionaire Koch brothers via their gubernatorial puppet Scott Walker. It really boils down to basic mathematics; when your state deficit is almost identical to the tax breaks you just handed over to your corporate masters, it's hard to hear your cries of poverty among the clanging chimes of your hypocrisy. And speaking of math, I just don't understand the calculus of suc...

Aside from being a palindrome and therefore cool as hell, 2002 will always be known as THE YEAR THAT I SHOOK THE HAND OF AND TALKED FOR TWENTY-SEVEN SECONDS TO DAVID FUCKING BOWIE. When you connect with the record company folks as a lowly record store employee, you end up meeting a lot of artists backstage who most likely don't give a fuck about you. Oh, you hope they do, but it's more than likely that it's just part of the job, pressing flesh and smiling wide while thinking of all the hand washing to be done right after the meet-and-greet is finished. And while I've met my fair share of artists whose music I loved (Jeff Buckley, John Fogerty, Fiona Apple, Dave Gahan, the guys in Love And Rockets and The Tragically Hip and Adult. and The Tea Party, Kenna, Kristin Hersh, Pharrell Williams...who will help me pick up all the names I just dropped?), it's a bit different with Bowie. Outside of David Letterman, there is no other person who has helped shape my idea of a...

Hard to mess with Joy Division, but this South African brings an arresting version of "She's Lost Control," complete with stunning visuals. Sometimes, everything looks better in black and white.

Sometimes, I can't help but reflect on those good old days of retail, where no one ever talked about adult stuff like "collective bargaining" and "health care." (More on those topics later.) I had two wonderful retail jobs in my life: Evergreen Park Grocery and Michigan Wherehouse Records. Evergreen Park Grocery is on the north side of Higgins Lake, and I spent the mid-to-late '80s (and even some early '90s) there as everything at one time or another: bottle bitch, gas monkey, deli douche, bakery gent, and ultimately behind the main counter, selling booze and condoms to the rich and poor alike. But the bulk of the '90s were spent at Michigan Wherehouse Records, first in Mt. Pleasant and then in Ann Arbor for a few short months. Those were amazing times in record retail, especially in the early '90s, where a midnight sale by INXS (!) could draw crowds out the door. But as other pursuits took time and bucks away from music, the sales evaporate...