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...